The Fall

"No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown."
-William Penn

You cannot avoid sin or mistake anyway (Romans 5:12), but if you try too fervently, it often creates even worse problems. Jesus loves to tell stories like that of the publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18:9-14) and the famous one about the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), in which one character does his life totally right and is, in fact, wrong; and the other who does it totally wrong ends up God’s beloved! Now deal with that! Such a down-and-then-up perspective does not fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness. “Let’s hope it is not true, at least for me,” we all say! Yet the perennial tradition, sometimes called the wisdom tradition, says that it is and will always be true.   - Richard Rohr - Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,p. xx-xxi Autumn is my favorite season. This time of year shakes out its best dress and beckons you to the fire sale of all the goods your senses want to feast on: glorious colors, misty mornings, apples in season, the cool bite to the air. But the name "fall" has me thinking about other topics this year. Richard Rohr has been writing daily about the necessary fall/break/collapse that comes to each of us in our life and is required for the passage to wisdom. I struggle with that requirement  - and I usually love to fulfill requirements - and the idea that it's true makes me quite sad,  not only for myself but for everyone. Yet I wonder that the season of fall, death and decay does not strike me in the same way. I enjoy the transition time of autumn even though the death of winter is on the way, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that the wheel will turn and bring green life again. If I could just have that belief about my own life, and the others, perhaps the fall and descent through illness, pain and suffering would not seem so bad.