Hard-Headedness

Twenty-five years ago Humpty-Dumpty (me) had a great fall when the ladder that had taken me to the dormer of the former Yokefellow Center slipped—with me on it!  Not a single Labor Day goes by without my thinking of that moment. It was quite traumatic.  As the ladder went one way, I went another, bouncing off the porch roof and then to the ground.  I have no “Serpent” to blame—the fall just happened.  The helicopter ride to Shock Trauma—the surgeries that followed—grow dim with the passage of time.  I live with titanium strips screwed together in my right cheek and a plastic eye socket, thanks to a renowned plastic surgeon who just happened to be on duty that day.  I’ve always been told I’m a little hard-headed—that  Labor Day fall—twenty-five years ago—confirmed that observation.

There was another “Fall” eons ago, so the Book of Genesis tells us.  It was a real disaster.  Adam (father of all humankind) and Eve (mother of all humankind) were a bit hard-headed just like me.  God created, so the story goes, stars, plants, and animals. These objects were not given the freedom or choice to be anything but what they were.  A lion is a lion.  A star is a star. 

But then, God created Adam and Eve and gave them the freedom to choose.  They could be what God wanted them to be or they could choose to go their own way (the gift of freedom is the nature of Love).  Enticed by the serpent, Eve chose to eat of the fruit and talked Adam into doing the same, thinking that by doing so they might become “as gods, knowing absolutely what is good and what is evil.”  (If that isn’t “hard-headedness, I don’t know what is). According to the story, this “Fall” brought enmity among human kind, made work a curse, and the world a broken place.  Eve blamed the serpent, Adam blamed Eve.  Cain kills Abel. All blame God.  Hard-headedness separated them, and continues to separate us from God, from our neighbors, and from ourselves.

The story of the first “Fall” (fact, fiction, myth) continues.  We’ve survived going our own way, and look at what we have created.  We are as hard-headed as ever!