“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. It is about pride. Pride is deemed the root of all sin and the initial motive behind the first disobedience of God. Adam and Eve, in their pride, thought they knew better than God. 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 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. Adam and Eve in their disobedience attempted to be equal to God. This first sin, prompted by the temptation that they would "be like God," represents a fundamental rejection of God's authority. 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. Original Sin is not personal guilt, but a condition. Our desires become disordered. Love becomes mixed with fear.

After the Fall, one of the very first things Adam and Eve did……was hide. And that instinct hasn’t left us. You can see it in your own life. When you begin choosing things that are not of God, you don’t usually run toward the good, you slowly start to pull away from it. You hide. Not always in some dramatic way, but subtly. You pray a little less. You avoid certain conversations. You spend your time wrapped up in things not of God. And often it can be because of that tension inside, you don’t want to feel like a hypocrite. You think, “If I’m not living this perfectly, maybe I shouldn’t be talking about it at all.” So instead of moving toward the good, you distance yourself from it. But that’s exactly the trap. Because the presence of that tension is not a sign to withdraw, it’s the moment of decision. You are being invited to choose. To either continue hiding, or to step back into the light, even imperfectly.

You can see the effects of this rupture evident everywhere. Instead of receiving life as a gift, we grasp. Instead of trusting the Father, we believe we know best. The Fall introduced shame, fear, blame, and death itself. And at the deepest level, exile. 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. But a fracture, does not mean we are broken… but we are wounded, and this wounded nature provides an inclination or tendency to sin, and when you realize that; you realize you are in need of a healer. Or as St. Augustine said, “We are not born as enemies, but as patients.”

G.K. Chesterton claimed that the real tragedy of the Fall is not only that we turned away from God, but that we lost our sense of wonder when we did. We began to see what is extraordinary as ordinary. Just recently, astronauts circled the moon and sent back some of the clearest images we have ever seen of Earth. Our home, suspended in the vast darkness of space. A world filled with life, hanging in the immense void of the universe. And yet, we can walk outside, walk by a quiet pond surrounded by ancient oak trees, and feel nothing unusual at all. We have grown used to it. But the fact that it exists, the fact that we can perceive it, the fact that we can even ask why it exists at all. There is nothing ordinary about that. The world is overwhelming, mysterious, almost impossibly beautiful… and yet we have learned to see it as normal. And maybe that is the deeper consequence of the Fall. Not just separation from God, but also blindness, where we no longer see His creation for what it truly is. The Fall did not make the world ordinary. We lost the memory of its wonder… But with God’s grace, we can learn to see again.

“We are born into a war we didn’t start”

Charles Peguy