2024-04-14 A Meditation on the Fall

“7 O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all the day; everyone mocks me. 8 For whenever I speak, I cry out, I shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. 9 If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. 10 For I hear many whispering. Terror is on every side! “Denounce him! Let us denounce him!” say all my close friends, watching for my fall. “Perhaps he will be deceived; then we can overcome him and take our revenge on him.” 11 But the Lord is with me as a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble; they will not overcome me. They will be greatly shamed, for they will not succeed. Their eternal dishonor will never be forgotten. 12 O Lord of hosts, who tests the righteous, who sees the heart and the mind, let me see your vengeance upon them, for to you have I committed my cause.” (Jer 20:7-12 ESV)

Ghost stories and straight-up scares: anyone not rightly scared by the Fall does well to see a bit more broadly, a bit of a bird’s-eye view, that our fulcrum, our pendulum swinging between Self and Trust, our balancing act, isn’t after all so obvious as we might take it; that is, obvious to the sober and chaste, but Knowledge per se is not wrong; Knowledge per fact, is a good thing, after all; Knowledge, in practice, feels “right”.

The Fall is therefore some means by which our Holy Spirit delineates and divides, parting the water, choosing the sheep on this side and the goats on that side. The Fall: widely accepted in its season, hurrayed and signed-up-for, its signatories need know this: that God hypnotizes and allows to wander; God somehow takes the meek and puts them in places of trust, whilst others are for a life sentence under the shadow of their actual factual Fall. Their past. Their repentance, not that Forgiveness isn’t met out, but that we are cognisant: the Fall was awful. The Fall was ruinous. The Fall… it was in casual guise apologized for, perhaps, but remained onslaught and dreamworld and factually troublesome. It was our habit. It was our mental compromise. It was a breach undoing, a sharp lance to the soul of Man, a wreckage calling for Jesus’ own hour of prayer rather than sleep, His own wakefulness, His own cautious abiding in the bosom of the Father, just as the beloved disciple thus reclined by His Friend and the Author of his life, Christ.

Therefore our habits grow on us and in the ultimate do pronounce forgiveness: we are no more troubled because we know the Devil is a slick beast and that we already knew that: we already knew we were a hairs-breadth away from Trouble. We already knew that we were in the driver’s seat of pride and of temptation, of ebb and flow, first this good inclination and then horrors that ill inclination. We literally rewrote our relationships so we could be coping and conscious of ill intention; it came out in the very allegiances and longings we pursued: the drink, the plain Knowledge not in itself ill, but ill when it means illicit behaviors.

No wrong in longing, in pursuing, companionships with other people; that is Good; that is Healthsome, but then again so too is knowledge, both good and True; so we are those intentionally awkward, restrained, chirping up our two cents in a cagey fashion for a season, that our dreams healed or our waking thoughts sane and peace, we can for once laugh a bit and know All is Forgiven. Our attacks of our fellow or gal. Our covetous desires and accumulation. Our lusts and faux-warmth. All these things, and the soldier today knows Fall, as a strange battle with what seemed once obvious and true, knowledge and power, both good things: the knowledge to be Solomon’s wisdom; the Power to be David’s Psalms of might, by which to Do Good, with which to Legislate Peace. But, no, God had other plans, first to lift up this one and then that one; by lack of design and plan professionally drafted, to accomplish an non-understood Goal; not understood by Man; subtle and glimpsed by the Prayer Warrior; hoped in, by those who didn’t breach the Trust; by those who were more intact than others, more together than the ones Compromised, who this hour Rise Up properly to Lead, because of proximity to Fall. Because of past concessions informing Today’s outlook. Because the mantle is shaken, the clothing rent, the submarine pierced, the battleship listing. In all these things, the Fall is Doctrine and Familiarity, that we may be patronized in our youthful state of faith and of affairs, towards the end we may reach proper Repentance, a Repentance fitting for the Kings and Queens we are called to be, like David, like Solomon, like Deborah (a prophet-queen), like the Virgin herself.