The Fall

“Through the Garden of Love I walked today

Twas mid-September; lush, green leaves

Did still cleave to their trees;

Birds called in octaves too pure to paint.

I smiled as I listened and walked. The sky was blue,

Blue and deep and bluer than the deep,

Divine.

And as I walked lost in such wonderful mirth,

Singing with the birds, I passed the queerest sight,

And stopped my song it did!

Twas a bronze statue, towering and austere and most out of place.

I shuddered at its grotesque intrusion, this beautiful statue
Blighting the garden’s song!

Like a weight impeding the garden’s flight, held determinedly on the ground.

Puzzled, I circled the statue and studied it I did.

Twas the figure of a man,

In bronze deadness.

Deadness!

His face was stern, eyes narrowed inward and tilted toward
a nose flaring in two couplets. Wrinkles pushed

At the chin’s repository and a tuft of hair, disheveled did it rest.

But his eyes…

 

Oh his eyes are what unsettled me so! So cold,

So formidable…oh so irreversibly dead!

I circled this statue many times,

In the Garden of Love,

Slower with each revolution.

Yet no revelation of likeness,

No similarity could I see, vexed as I was.

The statue died with a grudge in his heart!

His eyes were carved with melancholy,

The lines of sad anger, I could not understand.

And a blackness set upon my heart! Oh the blackness,

It weighed down my Garden of Love!

 

And do you know why I could not understand, Father?"

 

“Why my Son?”

“The statue was of You!”

The Father wore a sad grin,

The ones when pain is threatening to leak forth.

Then he gathered his son to his chest,

And kissed him on the cheek.

The boy ran his hands, still frightened, over his father’s arms,

Muscular mountains, indomitable they were.

“Those were not your eyes Father,” the boy whispered into his chest, unsettled and shaken by the ordeal.

 

“I know,” the Father replied, kissing his son again,

Looking sadly off into the distance.

“I know.”

This is the Fall.

This is what happened in the garden when Adam and Eve ate the fruit.

We were given a choice for we were made in the image of the uncreated God. The image of God is to be free. He desired a family. But families choose to love. We had to choose to love him back. There had to be a choice for coerced love is not love.

God told us to call him Father. So we did. We had no idea our Father was God.

But then we were deceived. The veil was ripped away and we saw our home for what it really was—created—and we knew our Father for who he really is—God. And thus, we knew, for the first time, it was inevitable!, what we really are—dust.

And so we built a golden statue...perhaps in the shape of a calf.

 

Because we learned that our Father was God, and gods deserve statues, dead statues.

Relationships are with Fathers…living Fathers with warm, compassionate eyes.