I feel a deep weariness each time I read a story in the paper about clergy sexual misconduct.  Oh, I know, you’re thinking that weariness is not the right response.  I should be filled with righteous outrage and with compassion for the victims.  I should be filled with holy resolve to see justice done for all who have been harmed.  All that is true.  Those are things I should feel and things I have certainly felt, but mostly I feel weariness and sadness. 

I suppose that coalescence of weariness and sadness is something like grief.  It’s a recognition of loss.

The powerful, imaginative story of human origins at the beginning of the Bible tells a story of loss.  It’s not just a story about gardens and snakes and angels with flaming swords.  It’s a story about each of us. 

Each of us comes to a realization that we were made for more, that something’s missing.  There’s a longing within us for something that has been lost.

The thing that is lost is innocence, but it’s more than that.  In our personal repetition of the drama of Eden, we lose intimacy with God, the ground and source of who we are.  When you lose touch with your source, you also lose touch with yourself.  Our loss is alienation. 

When we recognize the loss, we feel grief.

When we grieve our personal loss of innocence, that is something like contrition – a holy sorrow that can act as a signpost to lead us to change our life’s direction.

The weariness I feel upon opening the paper to read another exposé of misconduct isn’t sorrow for my own alienation from God, but it is an ache that arises from my solidarity with the sin of the world.  My weary sadness is grief for what all of us have lost, individually and collectively.

A drive-by shooting that kills a child; violence in the name of God that results in bombs going off in places of prayer; clashes between rival armies that leave children starving and homeless; shepherds who prey on their flocks; friends who betray; families that fail to love; these are just some of the sins of the world – and the cause of wearying grief.

That foundational story from Genesis insists there is no way back to the Garden.  We can’t be restored.  History can’t be unwritten.  Lasting damage has been done.

But we can be resurrected – brought to a new life, not the one we lost, but a new way of being in relationship with God and the world.

Prayer:  Being out here in the brambles and thorns makes me long for the lost garden.  Change this yearning for what is lost into hope for what might yet be.  Amen.