Man is not born, bad but he turns so. His spirit is willing to serve God but his flesh is weak. Therefore, men talk about morality but they gang rape minor girls. They talk about keeping the city clean and green, but they throw their waste not in garbage bins but dump them into fields or fling them on roadsides, and blame the government for not caring to keep Goa dirt-free. They talk about God, but commit heinous crimes.
This is best illustrated with this often told incident. “A painter searched the kingdom for an ideal man and painted a handsome, young man. Then he searched the prison to portrait a man who was completely opposite of the earlier one. He found a ruthless looking man there. Then copies of both these portraits were hung inside the jail. The painter met the prisoner who began to cry, saying; “Both these portraits is me. Once I was good, then my choice in life went wrong and I became completely bad.”
Man gets the variety for his choice through sense organs, which are doors of the body through which faults enter: — through the eyes he sees sights that are not good; with his strong limbs he does not serve others but “casts stones” at his neighbour; through the ears he hear juiciest gossip and spreads it, which causes mental pain to the affected person. Man is not born, bad; but his preference of whatever enters through his senses corrupts him and thus he “falls from grace”.
Etymologically, this idiom “fall from grace” originated with the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This term describes the change of the first man and the first woman from a state of obedience to God to a state of disobedience.
“Fall from grace” literally means to give in to temptation to sin and get on the wrong side of God by breaking all or any one of the ten commandants given to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Figuratively, “fall from grace” means to do something wrong and get in trouble with someone, other than God. So, when there is no control over soaring prices of essential commodities, no control over corruption, no control on robberies, no control on rapes, no control on illegal activities on coastal belts, no control on drugs menace, it makes the government “fall from grace” with the voters.
The higher the popularity of great politicians greater is their “fall from grace” in the minds of their countrymen when politicians change their colours as chameleons.
When a shopkeeper flings commodity on the scale with the experience of a table tennis player delivering a shot and removing it, with smoothness of a pickpocket, before the scale reaches the desired level, he “falls from grace” with the customers due to cheating.
One, “falls from grace”, when one’s boss finds out that one has weaved a tangled web to deceive.
God’s gift of grace is so valuable that it is most important that we never lose it; still we “fall from grace”. Therefore, Jesus died on the Cross and wiped our faults and extended the grace to all who would sincerely, repent and stop sinning; and start living again according to God’s honest ways.
