Worldly Original Sin

There’s an embedded trace of cruelty in every action we take, is something worth considering.

All inexplicably tied together; the unlatched locket showing a happy family in a dead soldier’s hand. The other soldier returns home, and his children make more happy homes. Homes contingent upon that slaughter, and it slithers toward antiquity.

How easily, in Christian lens, we’ve forgotten our original sin. No human in the world today is the innocent, from birth to grave, and even if such original sin is under Gnostic dispute, it still holds the same symbolic weight. Any other sin on the timeline can take its place, Cain as example, and more to follow, and all humans eventually find their lives blooming by Sin’s rot.

We seem to have this magical thinking, in the modern era, where, by mere division of body, individuality, one can shed all the actions of their ancestors and associates. So the bright-eyed child nods emphatically at me while pushing away all the goods and clothes borne from their parents’ choices, and their parents’ parents, and their opinions from many idle kitchen conversations, from consolation, from traditions and quilts, from a grandmother’s embrace and upon the manor distant hill he watches the apples fall. Apples rotting, forgone by the dead soldier that made this all possible.

How much love for pinning childhood as the psychological foundation for neurotics, and yet hurriedly so refuted its influence, stamp, on the rest of character and life trajectory and very essence of one’s existence. “You are who you hang around,” though family doesn’t count apparently. And yet as I watch the child grow, I see the father in him, the mother’s affection sure fading, and he snugly fits into the professions of his ancestors, inclinations, alcoholic fits. What deception! He raises the knife the same, sics the dogs.

You ask me, Ivan, why does the child have to be mauled to shreds? Because every child inherits all sin, and choice, of their family, and they will suffer for it. And there are no exceptions, however much one could plea the absurdity of this world’s design. Your existence, very sense of being, disposition, who you are, is contingent on all the choices made by them, and you will bear it. Hoping to shed these sins is to destroy your very essence.

You can go crusade against it, refuse any ticket toward heaven, destroy yourself by lofty altruism, but I must ask you, then, how much hubris do you dare? However many more accommodations one can procure, and tip-toeing… do you think after you hand over enough comforts the loss will be accepted? The missing grandfather, by the cough of cobalt mining, and how many gold coins can we value their life and missing influence on those remaining in the family?

There is no repayment. To that Ivan is completely correct. There is no end date where we can tie the bow and say everything’s great. Our worldly original sin infects everything, and demands, makes certain, you will bear such weights that have no repayment. How arrogant to think you can somehow “level the playing field” after robbing someone of their everything. The only repayment is to take back the very everything of your life, stripping it all of these endless bloodstained causes, from the house, to food, to clothing, to laughter, and learnings, playing, but that would then mean for you to no longer exist. An absurd premise, and to squander one’s current life, or “devote it” toward retribution, is to further dig in the heel, spit in the face of those who’ve you already slaughtered, by asserting the life they so desperately wanted is worthless, or that the sins you hope to wash away, can, and will, be washed, accepted. Such sins have no solution.

It wasn’t you, you protest. It was someone else, and I’ll do better --- and then I see every fiber of your being built from those someone elses. Do you think you can keep playing this game of covering up who you are by masking humility, gentleness, while savoring the winnings?

Thus the distinguishing qualifier is whether one will accept their blood-infused hands. There is no action to cleanse past, for even denial of self is only hubris.

There is no redemption, no takebacks, no path forward to remedy all the curdled organs. There is only only more action waiting. To pile on by sheer act of living. To be born wretched; Innocence is an illusion.

Let’s share this sin together then. Shed your imperative to “make the world right” or the arrogant “noblesse oblige” or guilt, pity --- we are all living off the torture. Torture that happens, today. We can’t opt out, make it right. It is so.

The only thing you can do is hold your head high, instead of taking the coward’s way out and still dispute. Still dispute that, somehow, you had no part in this.

Even if I see history’s slaughter and blood flowing about your face.