“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” is a quote from the William Butler Yeats poem “The second coming.”

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

In Yates interpretation of “the center cannot hold” he describes it as a situation where everything is out of control, a place where you cannot feel safe anymore because the “center” which holds everything together can no longer hold the weight and collapses whereby everything falls apart. The original draft was written in 1919 in the long shadow of the First World War, the Communist Revolution in Russia, the Irish rebellion for independence and the first wave of the Spanish flu. The poem expresses his concerns about modernity and the rupture of traditional structures. It captures the feeling that the old rules no longer apply and there’s nothing to replace them.

In the first reading from Genesis, things are surely falling apart. Adam is blaming Eve, Eve is blaming the serpent, and we know what comes next. They will be expelled from the Garden of Eden.  We refer to this event in salvation history as “the fall.” And surely it is that – a fall from Eden, a fall from grace. But it is more. I think “the fall” obfuscates what really happens in that scene in the Garden. I think it is better described as a rebellion.

A rebellion against God? Yes, but more closely viewed, a rebellion against God’s defining what is right and wrong, good and evil, all symbolized in one of the two trees at the center of the Garden. The “Tree of Life” and its fruit was available to Adam and Eve, but not from the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:9) – the fruit of that tree was forbidden to them. The serpent, in a sense, whispers that is what God is holding back from you – the pathway to elevate yourself to be life God. In this setting, the tree represents the choice between compliance/acceptance of God’s law or rebellion, deciding to pursue moral autonomy apart from God.

From the moment they are of the forbidden fruit, the center – the Wisdom of God to truly know good from evil, right from wrong, and to live in harmony with the Creator of all things – from the moment the center did not hold and since then things have fallen apart.

The “blood-dimmed tide” of Cain killing Abel followed, “innocence is drowned.” The story of Genesis from there until the account of Abraham is a story of one rebellion after another, the spread of evil, and God’s efforts to propose a path way back to a place where the center holds. But we are our own worst enemy. The Kings of Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Rome and beyond – and all who would be king – all elevate themselves, assume unbridled power, and establish moral autonomy apart from the Wisdom of God.

“The Fall” seems like such a passive, an accidental thing.

Rebellion is that active choice made in defiance of the One to whom our allegiance is owed. The One who ever invites us to eat from the Tree of Life found in the Word and Sacrament.

Image credit: The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise | 1791 | Benjamin West | National Gallery of Art | Washington DC | PD-US