Readings
The first reading was from a short story titled “The Guest” by Albert Camus. The story is set in Algeria during the French colonial era. A French police officer has delivered an Arab prisoner to a French schoolteacher named Daru, and he has told Daru to deliver the Arab to prison. Here’s what Daru does:
“Daru surveyed the two directions. There was nothing but the sky on the horizon. Not a man could be seen. He turned toward the Arab, who was looking at him blankly. Daru held out the package to him. ‘Take it,’ he said [in Arabic]. ‘There are dates, bread, and sugar. You can hold out for two days. Here are a thousand francs too.’ The Arab took the package and the money but kept his full hands at chest level as if he didn’t know what to do with what was being given him. ‘Now look,’ the schoolmaster said as he pointed in the direction of the east, ‘there’s the way to Tinguit. You have a two-hour walk. At Tinguit you’ll find the administration and the police. They are expecting you.’ The Arab looked toward the east, still holding the package and the money against his chest. Daru took his elbow and turned him rather roughly toward the south. At the foot of the height on which they stood could be seen a faint path. ‘That’s the trail across the plateau. In a day’s walk from here you’ll find pasturelands and the first nomads. They’ll take you in and shelter you according to their law.’ The Arab had now turned toward Daru and a sort of panic was visible in his expression. ‘Listen,’ he said. Daru shook his head: ‘No, be quiet. Now I’m leaving you.’ He turned his back on him, took two long steps in the direction of the school, looking hesitantly at the motionless Arab and started off again. For a few minutes he heard nothing but his own step resounding on the cold ground and did not turn his head. … He had already gone some distance when he again stopped and looked. There was no longer anyone on the hill.”
The second reading was from the Unitarian Universalist theologian William R. Jones. Dr. Jones was best known for his 1973 book titled Is God a White Racist? but reading comes from his 1975 essay titled “Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows.”
“Abraham’s situation, when he is commanded to slay Isaac, represents the human situation. Forced to decide whether he is addressed by God or Moloch and given the impossibility of demonstrating whose voice he hears, Abraham … must decide the source of the command…. If he concludes that the decree is from God, it is morally imperative. If, however, he decides that it is Moloch’s voice that he hears, the order must be rejected. But clearly, only Abraham can make this crucial decision.
“Likewise with humankind: forced by virtue of our freedom and the existential situation of objective uncertainty, we cannot escape the necessity to be the measure of even that higher reality that created us. There is no way to escape this responsibility … for it is a factor of the freedom that is our essence.”
Sermon
In last week’s sermon, I gave a brief theological history of First Parish; this was in response to a question asked by one of you during last spring’s question box sermon. Last week, I said that one of the theological strands running through the three centuries of First Parish’s history is our firm conviction that human beings have a great deal of free will. And at the end of the sermon last week, I promised I would explore how free will — the human freedom to act in the world — continues to shape us religiously. And that’s what we’ll consider this week.
Which brings us to the first reading, from a story titled “The Guest” by Albert Camus. I know some of you have read the story, but for those of you who haven’t, or who read it so long ago that you’ve forgotten it, here’s what happens:
The story opens with Daru, a schoolteacher who is French but who has spent most of his life in Algeria. He alone in his mountain classroom; alone because a blizzard has just ended, forcing his students to stay home. This blizzard ended an eight month drought, a drought which had driven many of his students deeper into grinding poverty.
Daru looks out the window, and sees two figures struggling through the snow up the steep rise to the school. These two turn out to be Balducci, a policeman from Corsica, now close to retirement, and Balducci’s prisoner, an Arab who killed his cousin. Balducci talks with Daru in French — the Arab doesn’t speak French — telling Daru that he must bring the Arab another 20 kilometers to the main police station. Balducci, for his part, has to get back to where he is based, since some of the native Algerians are planning to revolt against French rule. Daru says that he is not a policeman, and he won’t turn the Arab over to the main police station. Balducci leaves the Arab in the schoolhouse anyway, and returns from whence he came.
When Balducci is gone, Daru treats the Arab as a guest; he does not tie him up, and indeed he hopes the Arab will escape. But the Arab stays; Daru feeds him; they sleep side by side that night; and in the morning, Daru walks with the Arab to a trail junction.
There Daru gives the Arab enough food and money to allow escape into the interior of the country, shows him the two paths — one the escape route to the interior, one the path to police headquarters — and lets the Arab decide what to do. When Daru looks back a little later, he sees “with a heavy heart” that the Arab has chosen to take the path leading to police headquarters, where he will face certain execution. When Daru gets back to the schoolhouse, he find these words written in chalk upon the blackboard: “‘You handed over our brother. You will pay for this.’” And the final sentence of the story says: “In this vast landscape he had loved so much, he was alone.”
Daru did what he thought was right — he treated the Arab as a guest, gave him food and money, and refused to turn him over to a French colonial system of justice for which he doesn’t appear to have much respect. Daru does the right thing, and yet the Arab’s brothers blame him, and promise to take revenge on him. In short, Daru does what he thinks is right, and everyone despises him for it — he offends Balducci, the policeman; he will probably die at the hands of the Arab’s brothers.
There are two points to which I’d like to draw your attention. First, this story shows how our actions can define us. Daru defines himself by treating the Arab as a guest, by being a good host; the Arab prisoner defines himself by not choosing to escape when Daru gives him the opportunity. Second, the story shows that the consequences of our actions may be judged differently by different people. The Arab probably feels that Daru is a decent person — although we never learn exactly what the Arab feels, just as we never learn his name — but the policeman and the Arab’s brothers obviously judge Daru harshly.
Once we accept these two points, then we are led to conclude that there are no universal standards of morality with which all persons agree. And if we accept these two points, we are also led to conclude that when it comes to moral decisions, no one of us ever sees the whole picture. Life forces us to make decisions all the time, yet all too often we cannot foresee all the consequences of our actions; indeed, sometimes the consequences of our actions may turn out to be completely unexpected, or the opposite of what we thought or hoped for. Yet we cannot stop making decisions, because life constantly forces us to choose between different courses of action.
All this may seem a bit depressing. We might like to believe the good guys always win. We might like to believe life is like those old movies about mythical cowboys, where the good guys wear white hats, and the bad guys wear black hats, and the good guys always win in the end. But we know life is not like that. So maybe it’s less depressing to keep it real, and admit that many times it’s difficult to determine what to do.
I think about precisely this issue whenever I teach the comprehensive sexuality education course first developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association for grades seven through nine back in 1968, and revised regularly since then. Originally called “About Your Sexuality,” and now called “Our Whole Lives,” this course is designed to give early adolescents the information they need to make informed decisions when they are confronted with sexual choices. Here I should say that the sexual choices that confront early adolescents are pretty wide-ranging. At one end of a range of behaviors, early adolescents can choose to engage in no sexual activity, or in very low risk sexual behavior like kissing; and we actually tell them that it is healthier for early adolescents to stay at this end of the range of behaviors. Then of course there is a wide range of behaviors beyond that. Not only do early adolescents have a wide range of behaviors they can choose from, they are also called upon to make frequent decisions about their sexuality.
Nor is it possible for early adolescents to avoid making decisions about their sexuality, not least because our culture is awash in sexual imagery. Advertisers use sex and sexuality to sell their products. Movie and TV producers use sex to attract viewers. Songwriters include love and sex in most of the popular songs that we all listen to; even in a fairly benign song like Johnny Cash singing “Ring of Fire,” he’s not singing about wildfires in California, he’s singing about sexuality and love. Nor is it any wonder that sexuality so permeates our culture; reproduction and child rearing are essential to the survival or our species, which means that reproduction and child rearing are going to be a major concern for all human beings (even for child-free people like me). No wonder, then, that reproduction and child rearing permeate every aspect of human culture. Including religion and spirituality. Religion and spirituality are human activities, so of course religions and spiritualities are going to concern themselves with human sexuality. For some religions and some spiritualities, their concern with human sexuality is going to result in lots of rules and doctrines limiting the apparent choices that can be made by individuals.
Our religion takes a somewhat different approach. We have seen that rules and doctrines are especially effective; rules and doctrines may work for some people, but they don’t work for other people. More importantly, rigid rules and doctrines require a harsh and rigid view of human nature, something like original sin. But we do not perceive the world in terms of binary, black-and-white choices — a right choice and a wrong choice and nothing in between — but rather we perceive the world in shifting shades of gray which can often make it difficult to determine which is the correct course of action to follow. In our view, the real world is more like the world depicted in the story of Daru the schoolteacher, where people can make what seem to be the right choices, but which turn out to have consequences no one could foresee. To put this another way, we believe that human beings have a radical freedom to act. Even though some recent findings of neuroscientists may indicate that we may not have all that much free will, we believe that we still have to live our lives as if we had radical freedom of action.
No original sin. Radical freedom. A world where it can be difficult to determine what is right. Our religious worldview leads us to believe that we cannot, and should not, rely on strict rules and doctrines handed down from higher authorities. Instead, we have to figure out how to make choices — and how to live with the consequences of our choices when things don’t turn out quite the way we had expected.
At the end of the story by Albert Camus, Daru the schoolteacher feels utterly alone, or as the story put it: “In this vast landscape he had loved so much, he was alone.” This is where I part ways with Camus. Our religious worldview would suggest that Daru does not need to be quite so alone. This is really the point of the Our Whole Lives comprehensive sexuality education program that we offer — we tell early adolescents that they do not need to be alone. Indeed, much of the course is designed to improve their communication skills, not only so that they can someday talk with future partners about sexual choice, but also so that they can talk better with their parents and guardians. We also want them to be able to talk openly with their friends and peers about sexual choices. One positive result of this is we hear back from teens who have completed the program that their friends and peers turn to them for trustworthy information about sexual choices and about human sexuality. Radical freedom of action does not mean you have to be lonely.
The Our Whole Lives comprehensive sexuality education program is not just for early adolescents — there are Our Whole Lives courses for other age groups, including for adults. Next year, I hope we can offer the Our Whole Lives program for grades ten through twelve, that is for middle adolescents. My experience of teaching this program is that middle adolescents have become very aware that they are soon to go off to college or the military or full-time work, where they will be confronted with new sexual choices. As a result, not only do they want time to talk with their peers and with trusted adults about those impending sexual choices, they also feel a desire to improve their communication skills so they can talk more easily with others about human sexuality. In short, middle adolescents have begun to better understand that we are not as alone as Albert Camus would have us believe; we are not so completely alone as Camus wants us to believe, and we can reach out to others as we make decisions.
This has been brought home to me in talking with late adolescents (that is, people who are roughly aged eighteen into their early twenties). Statistics show that a large percentage of people are sexually assaulted during the course of their lives. Figures vary, but the National Sexual Violence Resource center says perhaps one in five women and some significant number of men are raped or sexually assaulted over their lifetimes.(1) Other sources give higher numbers; one source says 27% of American women have been raped, and 54% have experienced some kind of sexual violence.(2) And most sexual assaults happen to people under the age of thirty. From talking with late adolescents, I’ve learned that many of them either know someone who has been sexually assaulted, or have been sexually assaulted themselves. While no one chooses to be sexually assaulted, people do have choices about how to recover from sexual assault. And reaching out to trusted people does seem to help with recovery from sexual assault. Here again, we do not need to be alone; we can reach out to others when we are confronted with difficult choices.
And there are also Our Whole Lives sexuality education courses for young adults, middle adults, and older adults (that is, age fifty and up). At each of these ages, we can make life-changing choices — to have children, or to not have children; how we become emotionally intimate with another person; how we deal with the ethical implications of consent; and so on. I appreciate the fact that there is a course for older adults. As an older adult myself, I’ve found that our culture does not offer many places where people over fifty are encouraged to talk about human sexuality. Society tells older adults that we’re not sexual beings, yet we too are constantly making choices about emotional intimacy, about appropriate touch, and so on. Society also tells us adults, especially us older adults, that we’re supposed to figure things out by ourselves, without talking to other people. I don’t think this is the best way to make choices about important things. It’s easier for us human beings when we can talk things out with other people whom we trust, and we seem to make better decisions when we can talk things out.
I think about this when I hear the second reading, the words by Rev. Dr. William R. Jones. Dr. Jones was a Unitarian Universalist who served as a religious educator, a minister, and then for most of his career a professor of religion and religious studies. Speaking of the necessity for making choices, Jones says, “There is no way to escape this responsibility … for it is a factor of the freedom that is our essence.” Thus, whether or not you happen to believe in God, we are still forced by our human freedom to constantly make choices; and we must make those choices even though it is impossible for any one human being to know with certainty what is true and right. Jones used to say that both liberal theism and religious humanism had this in common; and therefore theists and humanists have much more in common with each other than it may seem at first.
Elsewhere in his writings, Jones spoke of “humanocentric” religion. By this he meant both religious theism and religious humanism where human beings are the focus. Some religious theists push off the responsibility for their actions onto a big Daddy God, and some religious atheists push off their responsibility for their actions onto a big Daddy DNA, or bid Daddy brain science. But Dr. Jones wanted us to see how human beings could be the measure of all things; and the implication here is that human community is an essential locus for our human decision-making.
That is one of the main purposes of the Our Whole Lives sexuality education program — if we can come together and learn how to communicate better, if we can get some practice communicating with others, we won’t feel so alone when we have to make the choices that define us. This is also one of the main purposes of our Sunday mornings — although to get the full benefit, you really have to come across the street after the service, you have to come to social hour, because that’s where we have the time to talk with one another.
We’re out of time, but there is still much more to say about the topic of human freedom to make choices. You can come back next week for more on this big topic, as I explore another big area where people have to make potentially life-altering choices. This week, I took a quick look at human sexuality as something that requires us to make life-changing choices. The other area of human activity that requires us to make difficult and potentially life-changing decisions is money. So I’ll continue this conversation about human freedom next week by considering how human freedom intersects with money.
To Be Continued…