Forgive us, Father, for we have sinned, It has been… we cannot count the years— since we knew what sin meant.
We mouth the words the nuns and priests once taught us, but the syllables taste foreign now, like prayers in a dead language we pretend to understand.
We have forgotten why we kneel, though still our knees recall the stone. We have lost the thread of what was broken, but feel the weight of something severed.
We built cathedrals out of doubt and filled them with our questions. We replaced altars with algorithms, confession with comment sections.
We are no longer sure You are listening— or if listening is something we invented to make the silence bearable, the vastness less vacant.
We have sinned—we think— though we are not sure against what. Against nature? Against each other? Against some half-remembered covenant, written in a script we can no longer read?
We recite the forms like actors who have forgotten their motivation, performing the ancient motions because they feel like muscle memory— like DNA calling us home to a house we are no longer certain exists.
Still we gather, still we whisper these inherited incantations, hoping they might still hold power, hoping the words might remember what we have forgotten.
O my God… we are… we think we are… sorry… for having… for having what? For having forgotten how to finish this prayer?
“The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it.” — Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
Lacrimae Sanguinis 2025: A Lamentation in Four Movements
By Donald S. Yarab
I.
Lacrimae sanguinis, Animae nigrae hominum terram maculant. They walk not as men, but as shadows unshriven, Each step a silence, each breath a wound. The ground groans beneath the weight of the fallen, And justice, long buried, forgets her name. No trumpet sounds for the guiltless slain, Only the whisper of blood in the dust.¹
Lacrimae sanguinis— The blackened souls of men stain the earth.
II.
Hate kindles fires no rain can quell, Greed carves its name in the marrow of kings. Fear is a vulture, circling unborn hopes, Its wings beating lies into trembling hearts. These three—unholy trinity—march undenied,² And temples crack beneath their tread. Where once stood gardens, now only ash— And the breath of God withdraws in sorrow.³
Lacrimae sanguinis— The blackened souls of men stain the earth.
III.
No voice comes forth from the cloud or flame, The heavens are sealed in unyielding hush.⁴ The stars avert their gaze, and time forgets its course— Even the winds have ceased to speak His name. Altars stand cold, their offerings stale, And the priest no longer lifts his hands. The silence is not peace, but exile— A stillness too vast for prayer to fill.⁵
Lacrimae sanguinis— The blackened souls of men stain the earth.
IV.
He turned His face—and we, our backs.⁶ Not in wrath, but in weary disdain. The mirror cracked, the image lost, And we wander, eyes open yet unseeing.⁷ We build our Babels in crumbling dust, Raise thrones upon bones, call ruin law. Light knocks, but we bolt the gate from within— And call the silence proof He never was.⁸
Lacrimae sanguinis— The blackened souls of men stain the earth.
Footnotes:
“Shadows unshriven” / “Justice… forgets her name” — Cf. Psalm 82:6–7 and Isaiah 59:14–15. Echoes of prophetic lament over moral collapse and unreconciled souls.
“Unholy trinity” — An inverted image of Augustine’s De Trinitate: hate, greed, and fear form a perverse sacred order.
“Gardens turned to ash” — Evokes Eden undone. The breath of God (Genesis 2:7) has withdrawn.
“The heavens are sealed” — Amos 8:11–12; Lamentations 3:8. Divine silence as the most damning judgment.
“Silence… not peace, but exile” — Apophatic void, not luminous unknowability. Cf. Isaiah 45:15: Deus absconditus.
“He turned His face” — Inverts the Aaronic blessing (Numbers 6:24–26). A divine turning not in anger, but in sorrowful withdrawal.
“Mirror cracked” — A fall from incomplete vision (1 Corinthians 13:12) into permanent distortion.
“Call the silence proof He never was” — Resonates with Nietzsche’s “God is dead,” here framed as mutual estrangement, not denial.
Note: The image of the soul as stained through inordinate attachment finds classical expression in Summa Theologica I–II, Q.86, Art.1, where Aquinas defines sin’s stain not as a substance, but as a privation of the soul’s brightness—a metaphorical shadow cast when the soul cleaves inordinately to created things, against reason and divine order. In this lamentation, the stain is projected outward: what is blackened within stains the world without.ain is projected outward—what is blackened within stains the world without.
It is easy to imagine the critical response already. Some heir to Harold Bloom’s anxiety-of-influence throne would ascertain that I, the creator, am anxious, insecure, prone to nail-biting—that I found it necessary to express my anxiety in more apparatus than poem, drowning the verse in scholarly scaffolding because I lack confidence in the work’s ability to stand alone.
Such banal criticism would miss the point entirely. If I were anxious about critical reception, if I were truly insecure about the poem’s merits, I would have foregone apparatus altogether in sure foreknowledge of such harsh rebuke. The apparatus exists precisely because I am secure in my intent, my method, and my purpose. I am not writing for elite pedantics and pedagogues who jealously guard their interpretive privileges, but for myself and any who wish to partake of poetry’s riches, whatever their opportunity to swim in the canon’s depths.
The truth is, those who argue against apparatus are those who would have poems essentially confined to an elite club, complete with secret handshakes, symbols, and degrees of membership. Like Skull and Bones or the Masonic lodges, traditional poetry criticism has long functioned as an initiatory society where full membership requires years of study, the right mentors, and familiarity with increasingly obscure reference points. The “let the poem stand on its own” argument sounds democratically pure but functions as cultural gatekeeping, preserving poetry as the domain of those who already possess the cultural capital to decode allusions, recognize forms, and trace influences.
When critics rail against apparatus, they defend a system where interpretive authority belongs to those with the “right” education, the proper literary pedigree. The poem becomes a kind of shibboleth—if you do not immediately recognize the echoes of Job, the inversions of Augustine, the liturgical cadences, well, perhaps serious poetry isn’t for you.
My apparatus dismantles that exclusivity. It offers initial guideposts to anyone willing to engage, no secret handshakes required. This is cultural hospitality, not anxiety—a deliberate act of democratization that makes visible the materials from which the poem emerged.
The Method: Nexus, Interaction, Reflection
A poem does not emerge from nothing. It rises from what might be called a nexus—a convergence of memory, reading, experience, and the particular urgency that calls forth language. In composing Lacrimae Sanguinis, this nexus became especially visible: biblical lament tradition, Thomistic theology, contemporary spiritual desolation, and liturgical rhythms that have shaped both prayer and protest for centuries. But rather than hide this genealogy, I choose to make it visible as part of the poem’s offering.
The nexus is not a conscious construction—it cannot be willed into being. Rather, it emerges when conditions are right, when reading and experience have prepared a space where seemingly unrelated elements suddenly reveal their hidden kinship. The Latin refrain lacrimae sanguinis did not arise from scholarly deliberation but from convergence, where liturgical memory met contemporary anguish.
Within this nexus, meaning arises through interaction—the dynamic tension between elements that resist easy synthesis. The “unholy trinity” of hate, greed, and fear stands in deliberate tension with Augustine’s conception of divine Trinity, not as simple inversion but as recognition of how spiritual language can be perverted by the very forces it seeks to name and resist. The line “He turned His face—and we, our backs” emerges from interplay between the Aaronic blessing and the lived experience of mutual estrangement.
The apparatus participates in this interaction by creating dialogue between poem and source. When I note that “silence is not peace, but exile” resonates with Isaiah’s Deus absconditus, I do not suggest the poem merely illustrates the biblical text. Rather, I propose that ancient prophetic cry and modern spiritual dislocation illuminate one another—that meaning arises in their interaction, not in either alone.
The apparatus reveals process without explaining away mystery. When I show that “He turned His face—and we, our backs” emerges from tension between Aaronic blessing and contemporary estrangement, I do not solve the line’s meaning—I multiply its resonances. The reader now encounters not just the line’s immediate emotional impact but also its dialogue with liturgical tradition, its inversion of expectation, its theological implications. The apparatus does not reduce mystery to mechanism; it shows how many mysteries converge in a single moment of language.
This transparency serves poetry’s deepest purpose: not to mystify through obscurity but to reveal the actual complexity of experience. When sources remain hidden, readers may sense depths they cannot fathom and mistake inaccessibility for profundity. When sources become visible, the true marvel emerges—not that the poet knows obscure references, but that these disparate materials can achieve such unity, that ancient texts still speak to contemporary anguish.
Finally, reflection—not as conclusion but as ongoing process. The apparatus serves this reflective function, helping both creator and reader recall not just sources but the quality of attention that makes encounter possible. By showing rather than hiding the poem’s genealogy, it acknowledges that interpretation is always collaborative, that meaning emerges from ongoing conversation between text and reader.
Confidence, Not Anxiety
This method emerges from confidence rather than defensiveness. When apparatus functions generously, it says to readers: here are some materials that were present when this poem emerged, but you are free to make of them—and of the poem itself—what you will. This represents confidence in both the work’s integrity and the reader’s capacity for independent meaning-making.
Critics will object that apparatus risks over-determining meaning, that by naming sources I constrain interpretation. This objection misunderstands how meaning actually works in poetry. The apparatus does not tell readers what to think about the convergence of Nietzschean pronouncement and prophetic lament—it simply makes that convergence visible as one layer among many.
Consider the reader who recognizes the Aaronic blessing inversion without consulting footnotes, discovers resonances I never anticipated or intended, and finds connections to their own liturgical memory. The apparatus does not prevent this encounter—it enriches the conversation by adding another voice. Meaning multiplies rather than contracts when more materials become available for interaction.
The real constraint on interpretation comes from ignorance, not knowledge. When readers miss allusions entirely, they are trapped in partial understanding. When sources become visible, readers gain freedom to accept, reject, or build upon the connections offered. The apparatus functions as invitation, not limitation.
We live in an age where what was once common cultural knowledge—biblical narratives, classical philosophy, liturgical traditions—can no longer be assumed as shared reference points. This is not a failure of readers or education but a consequence of cultural acceleration. Neither poets nor readers can be expected to carry the full weight of cultural memory. When canonical works become unfamiliar, when classical allusions require explanation, apparatus serves not as condescension but as courtesy.
The apparatus preserves a record of one moment’s convergence—the nexus as it appeared when the poem emerged—but it cannot and should not constrain future encounters. It functions as invitation rather than explanation, creating conditions for ongoing dialogue rather than settling interpretive questions once and for all.
Method as Cultural Hospitality
What emerges is method as interpretive generosity rather than critical control. The apparatus offers tools for encounter while acknowledging that even the creator does not exhaust the poem’s meaning. The poem, once written, becomes available for encounter rather than possession, even by the one who wrote it.
This hospitality extends to readers at all levels of familiarity with the sources. Those who recognize the allusions immediately may find additional layers in seeing them made explicit. Those encountering Augustine or Isaiah for the first time receive invitations to explore further. Those who prefer immediate encounter may ignore the scholarly apparatus entirely. All approaches are welcome.
In this way, creative method and interpretive philosophy align. Both resist the fantasy of complete control or final understanding. Both acknowledge that meaning emerges in relationship. Both find fulfillment not in closure but in the ongoing conversation they make possible.
The apparatus, properly understood, serves this conversation. It is not the last word on the poem’s meaning but an invitation to the kind of careful attention that allows meaning to emerge. Like the poem itself, it creates conditions for encounter rather than commanding specific responses.
This is method in poetry as in interpretation: not a tool of conquest but a lens through which the materials of experience might reveal some of their hidden connections. The nexus forms, interactions unfold, reflection deepens—and occasionally, if conditions are right, something emerges that was not there before. Something worth sharing with anyone willing to receive it.
“He shall cover His face, that He see not the land; He shall cover His eyes, that He see not this people.” — Paraphrased and theologically inverted from Isaiah 47:3
Hate, greed, and fear—forces both ancient and renewed—walk our world masked as necessity, embraced by many with cultish fervor. Their dominion is not imposed but invited—enthroned by a generation that traded justice for the comfort of certainty, mercy for the illusion of control, and truth for pestilent lies that fester beneath the tongue. In such an age, we speak of freedom while erecting altars to power.
Lacrimae Sanguinis (Tears of Blood) offers no balm. It is not a prayer for deliverance but a record of recognition—set in four movements, each marking a descent through abandonment, distortion, silence, and despair. Divine silence, once borne as mystery, now echoes as judgment. This is no resolution, only the slow, unredemptive unfolding of what we have chosen not to see.
John Martin, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (c. 1852) oil on canvas, 136.3 cm × 212.3 cm (53.7 in × 83.6 in) Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
Lacrimae Sanguinis 2025: A Lamentation in Four Movements
By Donald S. Yarab
I.
Lacrimae sanguinis, Animae nigrae hominum terram maculant. They walk not as men, but as shadows unshriven, Each step a silence, each breath a wound. The ground groans beneath the weight of the fallen, And justice, long buried, forgets her name. No trumpet sounds for the guiltless slain, Only the whisper of blood in the dust.¹
Lacrimae sanguinis— The blackened souls of men stain the earth.
II.
Hate kindles fires no rain can quell, Greed carves its name in the marrow of kings. Fear is a vulture, circling unborn hopes, Its wings beating lies into trembling hearts. These three—unholy trinity—march undenied,² And temples crack beneath their tread. Where once stood gardens, now only ash— And the breath of God withdraws in sorrow.³
Lacrimae sanguinis— The blackened souls of men stain the earth.
III.
No voice comes forth from the cloud or flame, The heavens are sealed in unyielding hush.⁴ The stars avert their gaze, and time forgets its course— Even the winds have ceased to speak His name. Altars stand cold, their offerings stale, And the priest no longer lifts his hands. The silence is not peace, but exile— A stillness too vast for prayer to fill.⁵
Lacrimae sanguinis— The blackened souls of men stain the earth.
IV.
He turned His face—and we, our backs.⁶ Not in wrath, but in weary disdain. The mirror cracked, the image lost, And we wander, eyes open yet unseeing.⁷ We build our Babels in crumbling dust, Raise thrones upon bones, call ruin law. Light knocks, but we bolt the gate from within— And call the silence proof He never was.⁸
Lacrimae sanguinis— The blackened souls of men stain the earth.
Footnotes:
“Shadows unshriven” / “Justice… forgets her name” — Cf. Psalm 82:6–7 and Isaiah 59:14–15. Echoes of prophetic lament over moral collapse and unreconciled souls.
“Unholy trinity” — An inverted image of Augustine’s De Trinitate: hate, greed, and fear form a perverse sacred order.
“Gardens turned to ash” — Evokes Eden undone. The breath of God (Genesis 2:7) has withdrawn.
“The heavens are sealed” — Amos 8:11–12; Lamentations 3:8. Divine silence as the most damning judgment.
“Silence… not peace, but exile” — Apophatic void, not luminous unknowability. Cf. Isaiah 45:15: Deus absconditus.
“He turned His face” — Inverts the Aaronic blessing (Numbers 6:24–26). A divine turning not in anger, but in sorrowful withdrawal.
“Mirror cracked” — A fall from incomplete vision (1 Corinthians 13:12) into permanent distortion.
“Call the silence proof He never was” — Resonates with Nietzsche’s “God is dead,” here framed as mutual estrangement, not denial.
Note: The image of the soul as stained through inordinate attachment finds classical expression in Summa Theologica I–II, Q.86, Art.1, where Aquinas defines sin’s stain not as a substance, but as a privation of the soul’s brightness—a metaphorical shadow cast when the soul cleaves inordinately to created things, against reason and divine order. In this lamentation, the stain is projected outward: what is blackened within stains the world without.
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? — Psalm 8:3–4 (KJV)
A child, in the earliest unfolding of consciousness, turns to the parent and asks: Why? Why is the sun hot? Why did my pet goldfish die? Why must we grow old? The loving parent does not scorn the child for such questions. Even when the answers stretch beyond what the child can yet comprehend, even when no answer can satisfy the deep, intuitive wonder stirring in the young mind, the parent listens. A gesture, a story, a silence full of tenderness—all serve as a response, for the asking itself is a sign of life, of spirit, of the soul reaching beyond itself.
How then can it be imagined that the Divine—source of all wisdom, all love—would greet humanity’s first Why not with the hush of welcome but with wrath? How could the natural longing to know, to understand the world into which humanity was born, be met not with compassion, but with a condemnation unto death?
It cannot be so. It is not the divine who pronounced guilt over the sacred question; it is man.
The doctrine of original sin, as shaped by priests and theologians, emerges not from divine decree but from human artifice. It is born of fear—fear of questions too vast to answer, fear of mysteries that human authority could neither command nor contain. It is a doctrine not of heaven but of earth, devised by those who sought to regulate the soul’s native reaching beyond the bounds of certainty.
For what is the story of Eden if not the story of the first Why? The yearning for knowledge—the desire to taste, to see, to know good and evil—was not the rebellion of prideful beings but the natural unfolding of consciousness itself. To portray this reaching as disobedience is to misread the very nature of the soul. It is the innocence of the child, multiplied and deepened, that yearns toward the silence, that dares to disturb the hush with a question.
The Genesis narrative itself frames the matter plainly:
“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Genesis 2:17, KJV)
Yet in the original Hebrew, “good and evil” is not a narrow moral distinction, but a merism—a pairing of extremes meant to evoke the totality of human experience. The knowledge at stake was not merely of right and wrong, but of the complexities, ambiguities, and perplexities of life and being itself. It was the awakening of discernment, the painful blessing of full consciousness—the soul’s first stretching beyond the silence into the unknown.
In the unfolding of the tale, it is the serpent who first stirs the question, bidding the woman to see beyond the command to the possibility of knowledge itself:
“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5, KJV)
Yet the serpent, in the original narrative, is not named as a satanic force. That identification is a later gloss, a retrospective layering by later traditions. In Genesis itself, the serpent is simply described as subtle—”more cunning than any beast of the field.” It is not evil in the mythic sense, but a catalyst: a figure who provokes the first stirring of conscious wonder.
The temptation it offers is not toward cruelty or depravity, but toward awareness—the dangerous and sacred gift of discernment. When the woman saw that the tree was “good for food,” “pleasant to the eyes,” and “a tree to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6), it was not pride that stirred her, but wonder. It was not rebellion, but reverent reaching—the first trembling articulation of the soul’s native Why—that set humanity upon its long and necessary journey into the unfolding mystery.
Later theological traditions, particularly within Christianity, would recast this moment as the origin of inherited sin, a fall from grace so profound that it marred all generations to come. Even softer interpretations would speak of exile—a banishment from divine presence, a sundering of primordial innocence.
But this, too, misreads the deeper rhythm of the story.
There is no fall in the truest sense. There is no exile. There is only awakening.
Awakening carries consequence: the loss of effortless innocence, the onset of labor, of mortality, of sorrow. But it is not severance from the divine. It is the beginning of the soul’s true journey—the movement from unknowing participation in being into conscious, perilous freedom. It is not punishment, but transformation: the invitation to become beings capable of discernment, of wonder, of seeking the infinite even while clothed in dust.
The expulsion from Eden, if it can be called that at all, is no casting away. It is a sending forth—a sorrowful and sacred commissioning. It is humanity’s first trembling step into a world no longer given but always to be made meaningful by seeking, questioning, remembering.
Nor is this reaching confined to Eden alone. Even in the later unfolding of the sacred story, it is the struggle, not the submission, that is honored. Jacob wrestles through the long night with the divine being, refusing to release his grip until a blessing is given. And far from being punished for his audacity, he is renamed—Israel—“one who struggles with God.” (Genesis 32:28) Thus the struggle is made sacred. The refusal to let go, the daring to seek, the ache of confusion: these are not condemned but crowned. The journey was never meant to return to innocence; it was always to pass through mystery, bearing the wound and the wonder of awakening.
Across cultures and ages, humanity has imagined a lost Golden Age—a time when the world was right, when peace and justice reigned, when innocence was unbroken. In religion, in philosophy, in politics, the pattern repeats: there was once a perfection; we have fallen from it; we must find a way back.
Why does this myth endure? Perhaps it speaks to something innate within us: a yearning for wholeness, for rootedness, for a home we can no longer name. Perhaps it soothes the terror of our confusion, offering the hope that disorder and suffering are not our native condition, but a wound that can be healed.
Yet in our fixation on a lost Eden, we risk becoming prisoners of backward-facing time. The myth orients our spiritual gaze toward the past—toward what was allegedly lost—rather than toward what might yet be discovered. We become archaeologists of an imagined innocence rather than explorers of an unfolding mystery. The soul’s natural movement—reaching forward into new understanding—becomes replaced by a desperate scrambling backward toward a manufactured memory.
This temporal disorientation fundamentally misunderstands the nature of spiritual growth. Wisdom is not the recovery of what once was, but the discovery of what has always been waiting to be known. The soul does not develop by returning to an infantile state of pre-questioning, but by maturing through its questions into deeper and more profound questions still.
When we orient ourselves toward a mythical past rather than an unfolding future, we deny the essential nature of consciousness itself, which is not static but dynamic, not preservative but creative. We mistake the spiritual journey for a return ticket when it is, and has always been, a one-way passage into greater mystery, greater wonder, greater questioning.
Moreover, what we call Eden is not a historical reality but a projection of our deepest yearnings. It is the mind casting upon the blank canvas of prehistory its own longing for belonging, for certainty, for uncomplicated being. We imagine a time before questioning not because such a time existed, but because questioning—the fundamental condition of human consciousness—carries with it the necessary burden of uncertainty.
Eden, then, is not a lost homeland but a psychological construct. It is the mind’s attempt to escape the very condition that makes it mind: the capacity to ask, to wonder, to reach beyond what is immediately given. The myth provides a name for our discomfort with confusion, allowing us to imagine that our questioning nature is not our essence but our fall.
And here lies the deeper danger: what begins as a fabricated consolation becomes, in the hands of authority, an instrument of control. The artificial memory of Eden, manufactured to soothe our existential disquiet, transforms into a weapon wielded against the very questioning that makes us human.
For when the myth of a lost Eden is seized by those who would govern—whether priest or king—it becomes a tool of manipulation. The lost paradise becomes a justification for power. If the people can be made to believe they have fallen, they can be led to believe that only through obedience—obedience to those who claim to hold the keys to return—can they be restored.
Thus Eden becomes not a symbol of hope, but a lever of command. Thus nostalgia becomes a chain.
For those who seek to honor obedience as a spiritual virtue, there remains a profound distinction between the willing surrender that flows from understanding and the blind submission that stifles questioning. The former may indeed be sacred—a conscious alignment with wisdom greater than one’s own. It is only when obedience is divorced from the soul’s natural reaching, when it demands the silencing rather than the maturing of questions, that it betrays both the human and the divine.
And the chain wounds. It wounds the individual, teaching him to distrust his own questions, to despise his own longings, to silence the sacred impulse toward wonder within himself. It wounds the collective, stifling thought, suppressing creativity, narrowing the imagination of what a human life or a human community might be. It breeds conformity where there might have been diversity of spirit; it fosters submission where there might have been genuine reverence; it exalts obedience over understanding.
Under the weight of this imagined Eden, humanity turns inward in fear rather than outward in joyful seeking. The soul bows not in awe before mystery, but in terror before judgment.
Thus the myth that was meant to console becomes a force that deforms, a memory that imprisons rather than frees.
Some might argue that certainty provides comfort, that boundaries offer safety, that answers—even if incomplete—shelter us from the storm of unknowing. There is truth in this. Structure can indeed nurture growth, just as the trellis supports the vine. Yet when structure calcifies into dogma, when the trellis becomes a cage, the soul withers rather than flourishes.
Man is neither innately good nor innately evil. Man is innately confused. Born into a world more vast than his mind can grasp, woven from mysteries too great for his language to name, humanity’s first impulse is not toward sin, but toward understanding. The soul, bewildered and reaching, gropes for knowledge not out of pride, but out of need—the need to make sense of the strange and wondrous being into which it has been thrust.
Confusion, then, is not a defect; it is the ground of wonder. It is the blessed ignorance that precedes the sacred question: Why?
It is this confusion—the condition of the in-between creature, made of dust and breath—that makes the human journey necessary. Without it, there would be no seeking, no questioning, no striving toward the silence that calls from beyond the edges of comprehension. Without it, there would be no reaching for the fruit, no ache for the infinite, no longing to pierce the hush with a voice.
The theologians, in their haste to impose clarity where mystery should have remained, mistook confusion for corruption. They mistook the stumbling search for the willful turning away. But confusion is not sin; it is the evidence of our created nature, the signature of beings fashioned for a journey, not for stasis.
To ask Why? is to live as we were made to live: poised between the known and the unknown, between the immediate and the eternal. To forbid the question, to cast the seeking as rebellion, is to deny the very condition of being human.
Thus, the first reaching toward the tree of knowledge was not a crime against the divine. It was the first true act of humanity: the confused, innocent soul daring to stretch toward the beyond.
In our questions, then, we find not our fall but our rising. Not our sin but our salvation. For to ask Why? is to begin the journey home—not to an Eden that never was, but to a wholeness that awaits us in the brave and beautiful reaching of the confused, beloved human heart.
The sacred path is forward—into uncertainty, into wonder, into the endless unfolding of mystery.
Northcoast Antiquarian 