I'm Fallen . . . So Are You

In her move to an apartment in town, my mother, gradually cleaning out the storage spaces in our old farm house, found my baptismal certificate and the order of service from over forty years ago. “We are born members of a fallen humanity . . .” states one of the opening lines.
    I am a member of a fallen humanity. My common ground with every other human is my flesh and fallenness.
    The fall behind our fallenness certainly suggests a preceding precipice.  To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, we may not remember the fall, but we do remember its height. We are routinely reminded in our relationships with others, ourselves, and with nature, that we’re not who we could be, who we should be. Our encounters with these realities have and can become existentially bewildering. In fact, some struggle with a belief in God based on the inconceivable evil in the world.  I’m inclined toward the opposite position. Not because I believe God is the source of evil. Hardly. Actually, His height of goodness provides the precipice for the Fall.  Our capacity to dredge the moral bottoms is inversely related to our capacity to touch the moral, altruistic heights. And it is the existence of God which makes this range apparent. 
    In the previous post, I described a few of the vast differences between the Genius behind creation and the rest of humanity’s contrived gods, whether ancient or present. Of further intriguing contrast is humanity’s having at some time enjoyed a dignified relationship with this God. The Genesis account, of course, describes the ancient account of creation including the creation of humanity. I do not see a necessity to see this story literally; however, that does not mean it does not display truth. Its obvious contrast to other creation accounts is surprising in that it reveals one God, a natural world devoid of gods--simply alive and beautiful, and a dignifying relationship between humans and God rather than a subservient, capricious one--as is quite typical of the ancients’ relationships to other “gods.” 
    This relationship between God and humans held “no shame” (Genesis 2). No humiliation--respect and esteem were a given. Between God and humans, between man and woman, between humans and nature--the relationships were secure and transparent. Now, perhaps this relationship came about in the early days of developing human consciousness: Once humanity evolved to a place of significant consciousness, humans were able to enjoy this loving exchange of relationship with God. Regardless, I believe this collectively unconscious memory explains volumes about our brokenness and beauty, our capacities and incapacities.
    For any relationship to contain the transparent freedom and dignity of genuine love, possibilities must exist to choose against the relationship. Envy enters the scene for the humans--a desire to possess God’s role; we developed an anxiety that he was holding back something from us to which we felt entitled--namely, His role. Tragically, we violated his boundaries in an effort to “be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:3).
    Consequences have rippled out genetically and historically. In our godlike state, we now judge others perpetually as “good” or “evil” or place them in any other variety of predetermined boxes we have consciously or subconsciously created. “In a word, we like to pass verdicts. To some extent, we get our sense of worth from attaching worth or detracting worth from others, based on what we see” (Gregory Boyd, Repenting of Religion: Turning from Judgment to the Love of God 2004). Having usurped God’s role, we no longer enjoy transparent vulnerability with others--although there are moments we taste it; instead, we often categorize others and assess them as worthwhile or not against our own standards. This tendency provides us with a sense of identity.  Having lost our spiritual identity, we now seek it from one another or at the expense of one another. We also endlessly justify our behaviors. We long for that secure rightness we once had; now we rationalize our wrongs to bargain for a cheap sniff of it.
    And often what we justify is our often horrible treatment of one another. It’s intriguing to note that man and woman lived in an equal relationship with one another prior to the fall. It’s post the fall that woeful disparities begin (I’m indebted to John and Stasi’s Eldredge’s Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul for this concept). Our relationship to nature became strained as well: we now have to toil hard to get by. The natural world seems to have no natural place for us any longer. We are the oddball out in the natural order. Now, having usurped God’s role, we have hoisted our will upon nature, more often than not, to its own, our own, and our descendants peril.
    Indeed, we humans have tumbled quite far from our original place in relationship with God, ourselves, each other, and nature.  To borrow again from G.K. Chesterton, our world is like broken pieces of stained glass: each piece--whether of nature, spirituality, or human relationships--holds something of the original beauty, yet the fact that it is a broken piece is readily apparent. This broken beauty stirs within us that endless longing for something more, although we may not really remember exactly what.  Nonetheless, it's worth remembering. Maybe the beauty will be more poignant and the brokenness more convicting.