Original Sin

                When the cold comes, the cold comes personified.  Even as the bitterest of winters rage on like from hell they came, and cancers come, and the cosmos tumbles out of the order we imagined for our plans, these devastations on their own do no damage to the soul.  They can bring us physical, emotional pain.  They can bring us challenges, fears, and even cowardice.  But they do no damage to the soul alone, and when they come they come as challenges we are all suited to meet and to traverse.  We have on our side ions of adaptation, and though at times we crumble like dried clumps of sand before pressures of which we were unaware, or about which we underestimated, inevitably we recuperate.  We convalesce.  No, no, it is not events that bring the cold into our souls.  Only people transmit the frigid, desensitizing burns that we can carry with us through the decades of our lives. 

                There must have been a time when a man or a woman communed with a brutal world, and personified it in order to adapt.  When faced with unbearable circumstances, when unaided by language, by civility, by grace, by love, what was that man or woman to do?  They became the horror to overcome, and when then they did it was natural and brave and without any shame or indication of inadequacy or ineptitude.  The world indeed is harsh, and over the ions we were once charged with facing it naked like children and so we did what was absolutely necessary.  With all the talk in our religions of original sin, of man’s flaws, it is easy to forget that first, the world was brutal.  First, the world committed sins against us.  In response to these transgressions, we adapted.  We’ve adapted well.  The world is now hurt, and we are in a position to either call it even, or continue and force our world to retaliate against us.

                If that happens, it will not be because the world is cold.  It will be because the cold we once invited into our hearts in order to sustain our lives with some semblance of psychological order has remained present far passed its initial uses.  Now, when the winters rage on like from hell they came, and cancers come, and the cosmos tumbles out of the order we imagine for our plans, these devastations can be faced with a mighty human mind and heart.  We can bind together, warm each other, be aware of how far our ability to affect change reaches, understand each other’s hurts and charge each other with the challenge of getting through, sensitivities intact, as human and as present as possible.  Yet, still, we see men and women everywhere jaded, cut, cold, hostile, most assuredly personifying not the world as it is in its unforgiving constancy, but a man, or a woman, a mother, or a father, or a brother, or an uncle, or aunt, or a collection of human beings transmitting a ruthless cold from heart to heart that was first invited into our condition by a brave, soldier of a person, protecting instead of harming, rising up to meet the challenge of survival.

                We all have cold spots in our hearts.  And though not particularly noted for this ability: cold burns as bad as any blaze, with more patience and longevity.  To be courageous now is not to take in the cold, but to face its lack of utility, and brave a world of warmth in which the weather we submit to together, overcome together, with our language, our grace, our civility, our care, and our love.