After the Fall
A Story for All Time
Sunday, February 8, 2026
Father Richard Rohr identifies how the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 is a metaphor for the loss of innocence that we all experience:
The Bible presents us with stories in “little theater” to prepare us for the Big Theater, teaching us, in effect, that whatever is happening in the Bible is not just there, it’s everywhere; it’s not just this person, it’s every person. For too long, it has been common for Christians to read the Bible complacently, often observing, “That was the problem with Jewish religion back then.” Thus, we cleverly avoid acknowledging that the exact same problem applies today, in our own lives and communities. If the text is truly inspired, it reveals the patterns that are always true—even and most especially here and now, in me and you, not just back there in them.
When we read Genesis 3 and look at “the Fall” itself, the Fall is not simply something that happened to Adam and Eve in one historical moment. It’s something that happens in all moments and all lives. It must happen and will happen to all of us. In fact, as the English mystic Julian of Norwich said, “First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God.” [1] It’s in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.
In Genesis, the Evil One, imaged as a snake, makes Eve suspicious. That starts the disconnection, an unraveling between Eve, Adam, and God. Suspicion does that in all relationships. Someone tells us one critical thing about another person, and that gets our minds going, fitting all sorts of pieces into a nicely constructed pattern. Suspicion almost always finds evidence for what it suspects. It inevitably moves toward states of resentment and an inability to trust outside myself. That’s the psychology of what’s happening in this simple story line.
The text states, “the eyes of both of them were opened” (3:7). What they were opened to was a split universe. Teachers of prayer call it the “subject-object split.” This happens whenever we stand over and against things, apart and analytical, and can no longer know things by affinity, likeness, or natural connection. Instead, we merely know them as objects out there, subject to our suspicion and doubt.
This move of “leaving the garden” begins in all human beings somewhere around seven years of age. Before that time, like Adam and Eve in the garden, we exist in unitive consciousness. It’s where we all begin, when “the father and I are one” (John 10:30), or my mother and I are one—as many of us enjoy in the first years of life.
Eventually the split happens. It has to happen. We will eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and suffer the “wound of knowledge.” We will get suspicious of ourselves and of everything else. We will doubt. That’s called the state of alienation, and many live their whole lives there.
God Tends to Our Wounds
Monday, February 9, 2026
Father Richard reflects on God’s tenderness towards us, even when we make decisions that harm ourselves or others:
Alienated people stop trusting that reality is good, that we are good too, and that we belong — to God and to one another. By eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam’s and Eve’s eyes were opened to a split universe of suspicion and doubt.
Adam and Eve offer the perfect metaphor for this new split universe, this intense awareness of themselves as separate and cut off. Today, we might call it their encounter with primal shame. Every human being seems to have it in some form: that deep sense of being inadequate, insecure, separate, judged, and apart. It’s almost the human condition, yet it takes a thousand disguises, showing up uniquely in each of us. It’s this sense of disconnection, however, that creates the yearning for divine re-connection and re-communion.
While Adam and Eve “sewed fig leaves together to make themselves loincloths” (3:7) in response to their newly discovered “nakedness,” there really is no medicine for this existential shame, apart from Someone who possibly knows all of us and loves us anyway. That can only be God! Perhaps that’s what’s meant when we say, “God alone can ‘save’ you.” God says to them, “But who told you that you were naked?” (3:11), undoing their doubt. God creates a doubt in the opposite direction and in their favor.
When the Significant Other says we are good, then we are good indeed. That’s what it means, psychologically speaking, to be liberated and loved by God. Other people can say it, but we will always doubt it, even though it feels good and may temporarily work. It is often the necessary “bottle opener.”
This safe and protective God, the one who does not reject humanity, is illustrated in a most tender way: God is presented as a divine seamstress: “God sewed together clothes for them out of the skins of animals and they put them on” (3:21).
Surely this is a promise from a protective and nurturing God who takes away their shame and self-loathing. That will become the momentum-building story of the whole Bible, which gradually undoes the common history of fearsome and threatening deities.
God takes away the shame we have by giving us back to ourselves—by giving us God! It doesn’t get any better than that.
Human love does the same thing. When someone else loves us, they give us not just themselves, but for some reason, they give us back our own self—now a truer and better self. This dance between the Lover and the beloved is the psychology of the whole Bible.
Once humans are outside of union—symbolized by the garden—the whole pattern of fear, hatred, violence, and envy begins. Much of the rest of the Bible will reveal the conflicts of living outside the garden—in other words, in the dualistic mind of disunion—and yet with the constant invitation back into union.
