O Felix Culpa

Nature's first green is gold, 
Her hardest hue to hold. 
Her early leafs a flower; 
But only so an hour. 
Then leaf subsides to leaf. 
So Eden sank to grief, 
So dawn goes down to day. 
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

The picture above is of my son John free climbing the North Face of the Eiger... or at least that is how I felt as he climbed the wall in a local playground! I've actually been to Grindelwald twice and did some outrageously dangerous free climbing there. Like my son's climb this week I free climbed because I was blissfully ignorant of the difficulty. It was my first time in Switzerland, and my first major peak of that holiday, and I blissfully traversed the Alps with little equipment, preparation or plan. I still shudder at the total lack of caution in that trip for I was the greenest of mountaineers ascending slopes meant for experienced climbers. Yet my ignorance allowed me to witness vistas that my experience didn't warrant. 

O Happy Fault! This Augustine sentiment reportedly inspired Frost's poem that I quoted above. I was first introduced to the poem through the eyes of S.E. Hinton's characters Ponyboy and Johnny as they were hiding out. At the time I read Hinton's book I was a street kid in Ireland and "The Outsiders" became the Americanized upbeat version of my own grim reality. It has taken a lifetime to even begin to understand the poem in the context of it's Christian genesis. Reading it as the world weary 13 year old skeptic, the poem explained that the innocence and hope of childhood always die in the glare of life's realities and failures. At the time I was sad it was true but also confused why something so glaringly obvious seemed like such a revelation to the poet. As an even more world worn 46 year old I revisit the poem in a different light. 

O Happy Fall is another English translation of O Felix Culpa and it is this translation that took me from the picture of my son climbing and the memories of my own climbing exploits to the poem, and from the poem to O Felix Culpa. 

30+ years have passed since I read The Outsiders and stumbled upon the poem with the book's adolescent heroes. I've been unemployed for the past 170 days, and enduring the silence and solitude of this enforced Sabbatical has brought me back to my Redeemer and how it was that I ended up wandering in places and witnessing vistas that my experience didn't warrant. 

The luckiest day of my life was the night I realized I was lost beyond recovery. In the darkness of that discovery I accepted that I was helpless, yet not hopeless. Embracing the terminal nature of my failure had brought me to a place where I could accept the mercy of God. Eden aways sinks to grief, yet in the evening of Eden's fall a new Golden moment arrived in the gloom of Paradise Lost. The 13 year old version of me understood the fragility of humanity and its capacity for self-immolation. The 46 year old version of me is marveling at a Gold that can endure. A Gold that is birthed in the Death of Gold's first Hue. 

For me "Jesus Christ intersecting this fallen human life" is Nature's Last Gold.... I'm still enduring the Fall but I'm trying to also experience the blessing within that fallen reality.

O Felix Culpa!