Joseph Bottum again, from his powerful piece “Christmas in New York”:
It’s not my fault—the cry we’ve made every day since Adam took the apple. Down somewhere in the belly, there’s an awareness of just how wrong the world is, how fallen and broken and incomplete. This is the guilty knowledge, the failure of innocence, against which we snarl and rage: That’s just the way things are; there’s nothing I can do; I wasn’t the one who started the fight; it’s not my fault. What would genuine innocence look like if it ever came into the world? I know the answer my faith calls me to believe: like a child born in a cattle shed. But to understand why that is an answer, to see it clearly, we are also compelled to know our guilt for the world, to feel it all the way to the bottom.