The Fall

“What was I made for?”

That question sits in every human heart.

Not just what do I want to do?

Not what career will I choose?

But deeper — Why do I exist at all?

God did not create because He was lonely. He created because love pours itself out and that means your existence is intentional.

That’s the design. That’s the “macro” level. Macro as in the, big picture or high level view of the situation.

But then something happened at the “micro” level of the human heart. In Genesis, Adam and Eve chose self reliance over trust.

And that is the Fall.

The Fall is not just about a piece of fruit in a garden.

It’s about mistrust.

From the beginning, God created humanity with an extraordinary gift: free will.

Love cannot be forced; it must be freely chosen. In the Garden, Adam and Eve were given everything they needed, yet they were also given the freedom to trust God….or to turn away from Him.

God is always asking us this question: “Do you trust me, yes or no?” The great tragedy of Adam and Eve is that in their moment of testing, they said no.

They chose “my will” over “Thy will.” Sound familiar? It does for me.

And ever since, that same fracture runs through every human heart.

St. Thomas Aquinas refers to four wounds of Original Sin:

Our reason is deprived of its order toward the truth. We instead fill ourselves with distractions

Our will is deprived of its order toward the good. Instead we choose what is always best for us. We are Self Serving

Our desire for the difficult is deprived of its order. We want to avoid discomfort even if it is good for us.

Our appetite for pleasure is no longer moderated by reason.

So if we go back to the opening question

What was I made for?

You were made for love.

And the tragedy of the Fall is not that God stopped loving us

it’s that we stopped trusting Him.

And when trust breaks, relationship breaks.

The consequence of that mistrust wasn’t just a rule being violated.

It was communion being fractured.

Because of that rupture:

We experience separation: from God, from each other, even from ourselves.

We inherit a wounded nature: what the Church calls original sin: not personal guilt, but a condition.

Our desires become disordered.

Love becomes mixed with fear.

Freedom becomes bent toward self-protection instead of self-gift.

Instead of receiving life as gift, we grasp.

Instead of living in union, we hide.

Instead of trusting the Father, we try to become our own.

The Fall introduced: Shame, Fear, Blame, and Death itself

And at the deepest level — exile.

Not just geographic exile from Eden,

but spiritual exile from communion with God.

The human heart was made for union with God.

When that union is fractured, everything else begins to fracture too.