THERE’S NOTHING ORIGINAL IN ME, EXCEPT…: So I ran across this person who says she doesn’t believe in original sin.

Fine.

But what I want to know is, what does she call it? What does she call that yearning toward hate, that reverse heliotropism? What does she call the damage that all of us bear from the time of our earliest memories? Is it that she genuinely believes in Good People vs. Bad People? There must be some explanation for the fact that so many of us would rather have five million things other than goodness–even when we know goodness will make us happy. There’s a–maybe it’s Garfield?–a cartoon about how absurd we find “the things people would rather have than money”–but when I look back upon my life, from age three to ten a.m. this morning, it’s hard not to think how absurd and pathetic are the things I’d rather have than wholeness.

Something has gone wrong. Calling it original sin, with the narrative that implies, is by far the most hopeful description I’ve ever run across.

I’d also like to ask believers in “total depravity”: That’s fine. But what do you call our knowledge that something has gone wrong? What do you call the memory of beauty, the memory of self and sureness, that is our only possible link to truth and the only thing that allows us to discern the difference between truth and insufficiency? As I understand things, those who believe we need no salvation mirror those who believe we are totally depraved, insofar as both think there are some people who have no access to the truth of our insufficiency, and therefore no sense of our need. But I think everyone has access to the truth that something has gone wrong–we should not be this way, and we know better, and we need to find our way home. We are exiles, not natives of this isolated outer space. We are traitors–not people who have only ever known an evil state. We know sin because we know beauty: Both are the same knowledge, the knowledge that we knew better.