My best boyhood friend and I started the Hoola Boola Club. We were maybe 10 years old and the neighborhood was teeming with kids our age. Summer vacation days were filled with hours of playing street whiffle ball, racing each other around the block, and other fun activities – the most fun of which was the Hoola Boola Club. This was a Club that convened in the woods at the end of our street and consisted of stripping off our clothes and running around the woods naked like Adam and Eve.

Once we even convened the Hoola Boola Club right in the neighborhood, at my friend Danny’s house. This house had a garage underneath with the driveway sloping down from the street. There was a row of windows along the top of the garage door which made a perfect perch for viewing what was going on inside the garage – a fabulous nudie musical review. We sold tickets to the other neighborhood kids and they were all lined up in the driveway outside, standing on boxes and other things to peer through those windows and enjoy the show.

And the show was great! It was a triumph! The audience laughed, they cried…

Until Danny’s mother unexpectedly pulled into the driveway!

Our audience scattered in every direction. We performers desperately dashed through the doorway leading from the garage into the cellar of the house. There in the darkness we fumbled around trying to locate our clothes and pull them on.

Danny’s mother opened the cellar door. “Why are you hiding?”

“We heard the sound of Thee in the garden and we were afraid because we were naked. So we hid ourselves.”

Oh wait a minute. That’s not our story. That’s the dialogue between God and Adam and Eve in the old, old story in Genesis 3. Sorry.

We members of the Hoola Boola Club thankfully managed to not get caught by Danny’s mother. Phew!

But Adam and Eve were not so lucky. And their story is so very important! It shares some striking similarities with our Hoola Boola tale and indeed, the whole narrative of humanity.

The most important of which is shame.

Getting caught naked by your parent just feels kind of shameful whether you’re a bunch of 10-year old kids in Worcester, MA or the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden.

And that shamefulness plays an important role in understanding how people who were created good became capable of sin.

Do you remember the very last line in Genesis 2?

“The man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.”

Do you get that? Adam and Eve were happy as larks running around naked in that beautiful Garden – just like the members of the Hoola Boola Club, just like my newborn grandson Elijah. Life was good, everything was beautiful, and there was no shame.

So what happened? What happened so that Adam and Eve hid themselves in shame and the Hoola Boola Club kids went running for the hills?

Well, maybe it’s that we all sooner or later bite into the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

I think sometimes what we miss in that old story is how human life begins with GOOD. There is nothing but GOOD. In the Adam and Eve story, the first couple are incapable of thinking anything but GOOD – about themselves, about each other, about God, about life. It is all GOOD!

But after eating the forbidden fruit they suddenly see the bad – the ugly. Now the garden is a scary place – they are naked, and ashamed – and they are even afraid of God!

I believe the forbidden fruit is self-doubt.

In fact, self-doubt is the very temptation the serpent throws their way. “God knows that if you eat the fruit you’ll be like God, knowing good and evil.” The serpent tempts them into believing there is something better they can be and have.

That’s self-doubt. Self-doubt is believing you are not good enough, that there is something missing in you, that there is some quality of character or life that you must try to attain. And why? Because then God will accept you. Then God will like you more. Then you’ll attain a level of perfection equal to God.

“You’ll be like God,” is how the serpent puts it.

The serpent lures Adam and Eve into a web of self-doubt.

So here are the people created in the very image of God, the people who are God-blessed and declared by God to be “very good”, and now they suddenly think there is something better they should be.

Self-doubt.

I believe this is the nature of original sin. I think the original sin that cripples us all is self-doubt.

And that’s why the Gospel of Jesus is so revolutionary.

“You are loved and accepted!”

Jesus came to redeem the God-image, to resurrect the goodness and the blessing of God in every human being – the very power that sets us free to love and to partner with God in building lives and a world that can only be described as “heaven.”

That’s why our faith journey, and the work of the Church, should always begin with love that appeals to the original goodness of people. Accepting God’s love for ourselves and our neighbors is the very first step toward wholeness and abundant life.

Dear reader, I want you to know that YOU are loved and accepted! You are a good person and have so much to offer the world. God has blessed you!

Now get out there and be YOU!

Hoola Boola!