Guilt, the Real Kind
“Where is your brother?... His blood cries from the ground!”
By Charles Rush
February 21, 2010
Genesis 4: 1-10
[ Audio
(mp3, 5.7Mb) ]
ere is something foundational about God's direct and open confrontation that finds its echo in every human conscience that is awake. And it finds particular expression in every generation.
This is from South Africa, 1948,
apartheid…. The opening lines of Cry The Beloved Country:
There is a lovely road that runs from
Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are
lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to
Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the
fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may
hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below
you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the
sea; and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond
and behind them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand.
The grass is rich and matted, you
cannot see the soil. It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the
ground, feeding the streams in every kloof. It is well-tended, and not too many
cattle feed upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil. Stand
unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator.
Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men.
Destroy it and man is destroyed.
Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see
the soil. But the rich green hills break down. They fall to the valley below,
and falling, change their nature. For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold
the rain and mist, and the streams are dry in the kloofs. Too many cattle feed
upon the grass, and too many fires have burned it. Stand shod upon it, for it
is coarse and sharp, and the stones cut under the feet. It is not kept, or
guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men, guards men, cares for men. The
titihoya does not cry here anymore.
The great red hills stand desolate,
and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lightning flashes over them, the
clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red
blood of the earth. Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left,
and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men
and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the
girls are away. The soil cannot keep them anymore.
If you grew up
like I did, religion had way, way too much focus on sin and redemption. The
religious life just had too much negativity, too much focus on what was wrong.
That is why we spend the majority of our time in Worship at Christ Church
calling forth what we are trying to embody in our lives, where we are headed,
what we hope to be about.
But that
doesn't mean that guilt is not a reality either. Indeed, if you get to mid-life
and haven't had something that you've really screwed up in a really big way
that you just wish like hell you could unwind somehow, you've probably been
living too timidly and that is nothing to brag about either.
A few years
ago, I was in Jerusalem with a group of Americans that were trying to
understand more deeply the issues between Israelis and Palestinians. We had a
morning seminar on Israeli politics and one of the leading professors in Tel
Aviv was giving a very careful and boring lecture on the many smaller parties
in Israel, when he happened to mention one of his professors, Michael Walzer,
and he mentioned that he had been at the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton.
That brought
back warm memories. When I was writing my dissertation, Kate taught Nursery
school at the Institute for Advanced Study. One of the best perq's was eating
lunch at the cafeteria. The Institute's first Director was Albert Einstein and
the second Director was Robert Oppenheimer, so it was mainly filled with
Physicists' and Mathematicians that came from all over the world usually for a
two year sabbatical as a post-Doc. But there were other faculty members of
note. I remember, in particular, the lunch discussions with George Kennan, who
was the Ambassador for many years to the Soviet Union. When we talked about
some international political issue with Professor Kennan weighing in and Professor
Walzer – at the time probably the leading political theorist in the world-
weighing in, with other scholars from all over the world usually adding
anecdotes from personal experience, it was the kind of lunch that was so
interesting you forgot about your soup.
Back to school
night was quite an event in October. All of the Dad's- almost everyone of them
spoke two or three languages- in our twenties leaning into thirty, impoverished
beyond reason, trading the same cars that sold for $1000 year after year,
drinking cheap wine out of a jug in paper cups, with a gaggle of kids in tow,
still in animated debate as the Director patiently tries to turn off the lights
to go home. So many engaging ideas and the world was so ripe with possibility,
now that the Cold War was coming to an end. We were going to change the world.
We'd been isolation from Russia, from China, from India. Now we were going to
release all of that potential, so no matter what your discipline was, we all
wanted to talk about the new political order that would emerge shortly. All
that warm memory comes back with a jolt.
The lecture is
over. Our lecturer is signing copies of his new, huge book. On my way out, I
tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Thanks for the memory about the Institute for
Advanced Study. My wife used to teach Nursery school there. We loved it.
He looks up
from his book and says, “Kate Rush?” He stands. “She was the best.”
I'm looking at
him hard. He's bald now and he's gone from gray towards white, even though he's
not that much older than me. He has lines on his face. He's an Orthodox Jew in
jeans.
Then it comes
back to me. We are sitting in their apartment. People had been trying to get us
together for quite a while. He was a political theorist who wrote about
religion. I was a theologian who wrote about politics. He was Religiously Orthodox
and I was a Religiously Not Orthodox. We had dinner together on Shabbat. I
could see his wife lighting the candle at the beginning of Shabbat and I
remember him lifting up the bread and giving the blessing. He was brilliant.
His wife was wonderful and kind.
I said,
“Menachem?”
He said,
“Chuck?”
It was such an
odd moment of serendipity and sadness. I'm sure he was wishing he had his hair,
just as I was wishing I wasn't hauling around this extra 50 lbs. We traded
stories about our wives and what we were doing now, as everyone around us expressed
genuine incredulity and surprise at our reunion.
At one point,
he said to me, ‘your son… the one that was always playing army and climbing
trees and making us all laugh, what is he doing now?'
“He's in
Afghanistan” I said. I couldn't say anything else and Menachem didn't say
anything either. We just stood there for a moment in silence.
Finally, I said
to him, “And your Son, the one with the with the bright eyes and the devilish
grin, what is he doing now?'
Menachem said,
“He is in a tank headed for Gaza.”
We stood there
for a moment and looked at each other. I could see weight in his eyes. I know
his wife enough to know that he was worried that if this boy should die, she
would never forgive him, even though she would want to. He knows my wife enough
to know that I was worried that if this boy should die, she would never forgive
me, even though she would want to.
We had so many
ideas when we were young together. We were going to change the world. And after
many lectures given, many books written, and sermons delivered… And here we are
still attending another seminar to gain some understanding… And there at
mid-life we stumbled together on the sinking awareness that whatever we've
done, ‘it was not, not nearly enough'. And now, we are subjecting our very own
children to violent conflict because we failed to develop peaceful societies…
As Fathers, we failed.
I suspect that
both of us wanted to say something consoling but we didn't. We were both
overwhelmed with the surprising depth of guilt and fear in the moment. We stood
there in silence. It was time to go. I'm sure we both wanted to say some
parting words but neither of us had any words in us. We touched each other on
the shoulder, turned, and walked away.
It turns out
that guilt- the real kind- is not nearly so easy to maneuver around. I suspect
that this is part of the reason that people have such a hard time actually
giving voice to responsibility, to actually saying that they made a mistake.
I'm quite sure that there are some people like Jeffery Skilling, the former
Chief Operating Officer at Enron, that just don't seem morally capable of
understanding their depth of responsibility. But for most of us, when we make
really big mistakes that affect our family or our closest friends, we can't
talk about it because we've interiorized guilt so much that it could flatten us
completely.
The really big
stuff, like our reputation, like the respect of our family, once it is ruined-
it is ruined! And I genuinely wish that dealing with it was as simple and
direct as saying a few “Hail Mary's”, a few “Our Father's”; I wish it was a
simple and direct as taking a vow of poverty and fasting for a season. But we
know that these only focus our conscience in the direction of repentance. They
are a kind of structure that the Church had to come up with because so many
thousands of people across hundreds of years have come to the Church with the
same presenting problem of guilt.
We know that
guilt, the real kind, is a much more complicated to deal with in real life.
There is a rabbinical story about a rich man somewhere deep in Russia or Poland
who was a notorious gossip. He gossiped about all of his neighbors to keep them
in their place and in the process, he ruined the reputation of a whole lot of
people. He was a kind of social version
of Bernie Madoff. One day, he gets caught, red-handed in the middle of a lie.
The townspeople call in the Rabbi to adjudicate his punishment.
As he was a
wealthy man, the Rabbi asks him to bring a favorite down pillow from his home
and meet him in the tower of the tallest building in the middle of the village.
When he gets there the Rabbi takes the pillow, pulls out a knife cuts a huge
slit in the pillow, and shakes out the down feathers as they float through the
winter sky like snow. The rich man watches all this and says, ‘that is it. You
ruined my pillow. That is my punishment?'
“No” says the
Rabbi. “Your punishment is picking up all the feathers.” And we know that it is
ever thus. The only actual repentance is cleaning up the toxic dump that we
poisoned everyone with. We probably don't get our reputation back and
everything probably does not go back to usual, but we have to pick up the
pieces anyway and do what we can do to make it right in some way, somehow.
The Bible gives
us the insight about our brokenness in epic terms because we were all born into
a social order that mal-forms people and we cannot entirely escape this reality.
The profundity of the insight is that we are indirectly responsible for
violence, for poverty, for ignorance, for inhumanity as we sustain a community
and a social order that perpetuates them in our generation. And we know that we
are directly responsible for our immediate community, our immediate family and
friends. And we know here, that hardly a month goes by, hardly a week,
sometimes, when we haven't done something that was hurtful and foolish that we
need to make it right.
So we are
called to become ambassadors of reconciliation. We are called to heal. We are
called to make things right. And somehow, some way, when we are engaged in the
actual difficult work of reconciliation, we recover some of our compassion,
some of our integrity, some of our love- some of our humanity.
As it turns out in real life, it is
not nearly as important to look like you never make mistakes as it is that you
actually grow through the mistakes that you own. These aren't perfect
people but they are rounded people. They aren't whole. They are healed.
My grandmother had an expression for
people that have developed a strength of character from living through
adversity, absorbing blows from a morally complicated situation, and growing
through it. She would say, “Emma Fredrick… is a sturdy woman.” And that is what I hope for you, that you can become
a sturdy presence among your people: Warm, understanding, encouraging
exploration, working through failure towards reconciliation, fostering mutual
growth. That is where we want to head. And, as you go, I share with you the
quiet confidence that a friend from South Africa used to share with me. He
would say, “God is not done with you yet… not yet”… Amen.
© 2010
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
