September 1, 2024
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Albert Camus ends his essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus”, thus:
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I’m no scholar or even first-year student of Camus’s absurdist existential philosophy and the tiny bit I’ve read about it tells me that I’m too filled with the DNA of the Resurrection to abandon all hope, as Camus suggests a true absurdist must do. Nonetheless, for some years, I’ve found myself drawn to those last few lines from his Myth of Sisyphus: “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
This quote came up again for me a few months ago as I contemplated a world on fire – literally and figuratively, tens of thousands of people dying or starving each day, war raging in the middle east, every possible version of climate catastrophe manifest daily and a political landscape at home that looked as grim as it has ever looked in my lifetime.
Then, in conversation with a friend, they told me that they don’t think anything they do matters, that it’s all for naught, what’s the point? Surely a sign of depression you might say, as my friend’s doctor did. And yet, don’t we maybe all feel that way? Aren’t we all more than a little bit depressed by our insignificance and impotence in this moment? Perhaps, if you, like me, support one political party’s vision for our future over the other’s, your own depression has lifted in recent weeks- indeed, perhaps you are living in a state of euphoria at this moment. But even as our US election now seems to be on more even footing, none of the other world catastrophes has abated.
If you’ve ever worked for social change, your work has probably often felt Sisyphean – push, push, push, gain a little ground, get a small victory, feel the backlash, start over again. And yet you continued. Were you happy, as Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus to be? And if so, why? Why did you stay? Why did you keep pushing that boulder up the mountain?
I’m pretty sure I know why I did. The people I worked with before I left my regular day job were amazing – smart, committed, compassionate, driven and, for the most part, collaborative. We pushed together for changes, celebrated victories, then geared up for the push back or the next thing. We supported each other. Though I rarely socialized with my colleagues outside of work situations, I nonetheless considered them my friends and folks I could count on for companionship on the journey up the mountain.
But I don’t work with those folks anymore. That’s where you come in.
My Tuesday morning walking partner, Marta Brenden, recently sent me an excerpt from Kathleen Norris’s book on the vocabulary of religion, Amazing Grace:
Church, she says, is the Christian community and it exists to worship God and to love your neighbor as yourself. The part of this equation that the apostate in me tends to scorn is that worshipping God means loving my neighbor.
She goes on:
A Presbyterian pastor once reminded me, . . . “that we go to church for other people. Because,” he added, “someone may need you there.”
“Someone may need you there.” And I may also need to admit that I need them. Wretched as I am, it may do someone good just to see my face, or share a conversation over coffee before the worship service; . . .
That’s why we come to church – because someone here may need us – or we them. I appreciate this clarification from Norris because, while I know that I need to be at church every Sunday (and not just because I commit to it as a Stewards each year) but I’m not always clear why. Sandra said it well last Sunday when Erica Lloyd gave us permission to add non scriptural references to our personal “canon.” Sandra said “You” – meaning us – “are my canon.” And what a beautiful and tender expression of love was the email exchange between Sandra and Ron in the aftermath of worship.
And yet. Sweet as a love note we might get by showing up at church can be, we can still feel insignificant and impotent in the face of the enormity of the world’s suffering.
Speaking in July as New York Avenue Presbyterian Church’s McClendon Scholar in Residence, Rev. Dr. Kenyatta Gilbert, of the Howard University School of Divinity, noted that “we are living in a time of ruptured imagination. . . a moment of theological insecurity and political insensibility. The media contributes to this state of rupture by providing an enormous quantity of bad news on which no action can be taken.”
An enormous quantity of bad news on which no action can be taken. Well, if you read or listen to the news, you already know that to be true but do you ever actually say it to yourself out loud? Can you acknowledge that it just might be a contributing factor to your feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, impotence?
Later in the lecture, Gilbert directed us to the wise words of Jonathan Franzen from his New Yorker article of about five years ago entitled “What if We Stopped Pretending?” New Yorker 19_09.08 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending
In the article, Franzen proposes that instead of pretending that we can fix the climate catastrophe, we need to accept that disaster is coming.
Stay with me. It does get better.
Franzen starts his article thus:
“There is infinite hope, Kafka tells us, “only not for us”. . . But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: “There is no hope except for us.”
Further on in the article he says
All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was winnable. Once you accept that we’ve lost it, other kinds of action take on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the urgency of almost any world-improving action. In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action.
Franzen goes on to name virtually any area of political action you could think of – racism, wealth inequality, immigration, on and on – as meaningful climate action. Then he gets to the part that most caught me:
And then there’s the matter of hope. If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them longer-term, most of them shorter. It’s fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for.
I find these words of Franzen strangely comforting.
And, in the way that when we’re thinking about something thematically everything around us seems related, I recall a recently-watched movie starring Bill Nighy called The Beautiful Game about the Homeless World Cup. I say that it’s about the Homeless World Cup but it’s really about salvation. A line in the movie – you really should watch it if you haven’t already – goes something like: “We don’t save ourselves; we save each other.”
I kind of think that’s what we’re about at Seekers when we’re at our best.
For most of the 38 years I’ve been at Seekers, few people other than my spouse Pat Conover have used the word “salvation”. Now we are having a class in the School for Christian Growth called Sin (also an infrequently used word here), Salvation and the Afterlife. But even without using the word, we have a few ideas about how to be on the path. One way is by committing to practices or disciplines that we believe help us on our own spiritual journey: daily prayer and meditation, weekly worship, yearly silent retreat, generous financial giving, among other practices. We believe membership in a mission group – growing individually and with each other as we share a common task or mission – is helpful in our individual and collective spiritual journeys.
And we find other ways to nourish each other through shared experiences. Over several decades, many of you have joined camping adventures to Dolly Sods and other destinations, organized outside the structures of Seekers but nonetheless nourishing those in the community who are fed by nature and camping, who come alive in these settings. Though not a participant myself, I am confident that strong relationships are built on those outings, relationships that people can count on. Kevin Barwick spoke eloquently a few weeks ago about 15-year old Eli Kraybill’s deep engagement with adults from Seekers on one such outing.
Earth and Spirit mission group invites us on hikes, on Anacostia River excursions, on park clean-ups. Opportunities to learn, to serve, to make connections with each other.
Spiritual Companions – a completely open, drop-in group with no prerequisites for joining – meets once a month for conversation about our spiritual journeys and how we can support each other on them. Last week we asked ourselves what we can do to hold anger in love.
Martha’s Mob offers fellowship opportunities a few times a year around sprucing up our much-loved and much-used building.
Small groups of Seekers get together regularly for deep sharing and spiritual companionship, regardless of their mission group status.
When we arrive at church on Sunday, we ask each other how we are, most especially when we know of some challenge that came up during the week.
And close to my heart at this moment is the work of the Racial and Ethnic Justice Ministry Team. For more than six months, the REJMT has been wrestling with language for a statement to bring to the wider community about the Israel/Gaza conflict. Meeting after meeting we parse language, we talk, we invite others to speak to us, we listen to sermons from ourselves and those outside the community, and we can’t get to language that even our small faithful band can agree on. But we listen; we speak as respectfully as we are able where deep feeling and pain are so close to the surface. And we arrive at the end of yet another meeting with no resolution but with an idea for maybe one tiny step forward. And we keep coming back. Next week, at the September Stewards meeting, we’ll bring forward a statement for consideration, even though we don’t have unanimity among our group on its wording. In some very messy way, I think we are saving each other – saving each other from giving in to the temptation to disengage from a very painful but important conversation about a very painful but important matter.
So. We need to identify and follow the practices/disciplines that support our spiritual journey and then keep showing up in places where our presence matters- places that make us come alive, as Howard Thurman encourages us to do, places of service, places of commitment, places where maybe we can save something or someone we love or they can save us, places where we can experience small victories that feed and sustain our hope. We need to keep showing up for each other.
I’ll reiterate what I said at the outset: I have too much Resurrection DNA in me to abandon all hope, as Camus says a true absurdist must do. And going back to Sisyphus, I do agree that the struggle itself can be filled with meaning. But while absurdists perhaps must imagine Sisyphus happy, I cannot. Because he doesn’t have you with him in the struggle.
I’m glad I do.
May it be so.
