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Reflections on Summer Reading
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 3, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Jeremiah 22:1-9 Luke 22:24-34
The summer of 2006 has been, if nothing else, a bloody summer: the continuing and now heightened civilian carnage in Iraq, the war between Israel and the Hezbollah militia that has taken out many more innocents than soldiers, the on-again-off-again truce in Darfur where rape persists as the violence of choice, warheads launched from the heart of darkness in North Korea and likewise the threat of Iranian missiles in the making, “bright young British Muslims with their innocent-looking sports drinks” plotting mass murder in the skies, not to mention closer to home, the streets of Philadelphia strewn with victims of bullets both aimed and aimless in the night. Perhaps it is because I necessarily have stayed close to home and so the headlines this summer, but I must admit, at summer’s end, to a bit of ennui in the sense of world-weariness, which has more to do with the vacation none of us on this planet can take from the human condition than with a lack of any so-called “days off”. Still, having missed the annual chance to quit the headlines for a stack of novels, I decided to seize at least one day wherein my imagination might roam. Taking my cue from the President’s summer reading list, I settled down, Ernesto on the way, to revisit Albert Camus’ The Stranger. “A quick read” I think the President or his press secretary said and that it is, though the word “thick” more readily came to mind as I turned each page of my yellowed high school paperback. The story is told in the voice of a young French national in Algiers named Meursault whose seemingly flat affect throughout his mother’s funeral at the beginning of the novel sends him, in the end, to the guillotine for the inexplicable shooting of an Arab stranger on the beach. As the courtroom drama plays out, it becomes clear that every detail of Meursault’s minimal response to the people and circumstances of his life will be used to convict him of a murder that has left him puzzled but without regret. “I accuse the prisoner,” says the prosecutor with great vehemence, “of behaving at his mother’s funeral in a way that showed he was already a criminal at heart…a man without a soul.” Curiously the only heart-felt emotion we see in Meursault throughout the entire novel is in response to an unwelcome visit by the prison’s chaplain. After failing to engage Meursault in the possibility of God’s existence or life after death, the chaplain promises to pray for Meursault. “Then,” Meursault tells us, “I don’t know how it was, but something seemed to break inside me, and I started yelling at the top of my voice. I hurled insults at him, I told him not to waste his rotten prayers on me….Nothing, nothing had the least importance…the deaths of others, or a mother’s love or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses….And what difference could it make if, after being charged with murder, he were executed because he didn’t weep at his mother’s funeral, since it all came to the same thing in the end?” The chaplain flees in tears while Meursault reports that the great rush of anger had washed him clean, emptied him of hope. “…gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars” he says in the end, “for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself…” The Stranger was published in 1942. Camus, a journalist at the time, was to live through the Nazi occupation of France as part of the resistance and through the struggle of Algerian independence against France as a native of Algeria. Both contexts “led him to conclude,” according to Adam Gopnik in the last week’s New Yorker, “that the ‘primitive’ impulse to kill and torture shared a taproot with the habit of abstraction, of thinking of the other as a class of entities….‘We have witnessed’” he wrote, “‘lying, humiliation, killing, deportation and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology,’” for whom “‘fear is a method.’” The globe is strewn with the consequences of this habit of abstraction, of thinking about the other as a category, as well as with the consequences of a fatalism that lays open once human hearts to the benign indifference of the universe…an indifference that leads one to conclude there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven (but in the end it all comes to the same thing): a time to be born and a time to die…a time to kill and a time to heal,…a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.” Or as Meursault says with a revolver in his hand facing an Arab, an abstraction on the beach, “it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.” The human predicament, at least according to Scripture and I think also according to Camus, is that we are free to do either. “The freedom to act [writes Gopnik] includes the freedom to do evil, and the murderer within us is no further away than a walk on the beach in a bad mood” (or, I aver from Camus’ opposition to capital punishment, capital murder is no further away than a judge on a bench in a bad mood). We turn on a dime and though we do not pull the trigger, we stand convicted by our flat affect in the face of human suffering, by our habit of abstraction before the reality of the stranger on the beach. The gospel according to The New Yorker, “the way out of Meursaultism” says Gopnik, “is to think about particular people, proximate causes, and obtainable objectives.” It is a gospel that partakes of what he earlier acknowledged to be the “sunny optimism of humanism to imagine that books change lives, and that no one can come away from The Stranger entirely unaffected.” Even though I do believe books can alter the human imagination and change our way of thinking, the sunny optimism of humanism presumes a control—both of the self and of society—that surely cannot hold post-Holocaust. What, then, is the way out of Meursaultism: what can keep us from firing and falling so far from God’s grace that we become siblings of indifference? The counter story to The Stranger is the story of another stranger at whose trial every detail of his maximal response to the people and circumstances of his life is used to convict him and sentence him to death by crucifixion. Yet here there is no sense that crucified or not crucified, it would come to the same thing. Rather the way out of the indifference of the universe and the habit of abstraction could only be through the radical particularity of God who quit heaven’s height to be born for us and so to die for us a death that depended upon the human freedom to act, the human freedom to do evil. The murderer in us is no farther away than thirty pieces of silver. So this stranger invites to his last supper twelve men who might betray him or not, twelve potentially murderous accomplices who knew as well as their host knew: the betrayer could have been any of them. Why? Why is the murderer within no farther away than a walk on the beach in a bad mood, [the hand dipped in the bowl on a dark night]?” asks Gopnik. Because we “vaguely imagine, in a moral haze…, that on the other side of murder lies some kind of expiation…a way of pushing past alienation….” We imagine wrongly in every other story we can tell ourselves: the story of our wars, our righteous executions, our moral exclusions, our ideologically fueled causes, our interpersonal pyrrhic victories. So it is in all these things that Satan sifts us like wheat and has us, even in our highest acts and finest intentions, in his camp. But within the story of our salvation, we are told truly that on the other side of death there is expiation and a way of pushing past alienation, for in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ these things are accomplished. On the other side of the grave of this singular stranger, this murdered Messiah, the expiation and the life lived eternally past alienation awaits our return. This is indeed a story that changes lives, we proclaim, the narrative that is the cradle to our second birth by God’s Spirit. And we are the community sent into the world to tell the story to the particular person before us who awaits death no less than we. We are the community that gathered week after week not for reasons of cheery humanism but in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead to eternal life. We are the community whose life in the world counters the indifference of the universe with the absurd claim that, amid the rubble of a summer such as ours, God is still working in the world to make and keep human life human. The story of this other stranger finally was not lost on Albert Camus. Sometime before his untimely death, Camus began attending the American Church in Paris. He had come first to hear Marcel Dupre play the organ and later to hear the sermons of a Methodist minister by the name of Howard Mumma. Mumma and Camus became friends, a fact that Mumma did not disclose until, at 92, he wrote of their conversations in the Christian Century. “One day toward the end of my summer in Paris,” he begins, “the concierge’s wife prepared supper for Camus and me.” After the meal, as they sat looking over the Seine, Camus asked Mumma if he performed baptisms. “For a moment,” Mumma wrote, “I thought I was going to fall off my chair.” They proceeded to talk about what Camus called “the significance of the rite” in the context of Camus’ dissatisfaction with existentialism. “The reason I have been coming to church” he confessed to this preacher, “is because I am seeking. I’m almost on a pilgrimage—seeking something to fill the void that I am experiencing—and no one else knows. Certainly the public and the readers of my novels, while they see that void, are not finding the answers in what they are reading. But deep down you are right—I am searching for something that the world is not giving me.” “Perhaps,” Camus mused, “we are the only ones who have ever asked the great questions of life. Perhaps since Nazism, we are also the ones who have loved and lost and who are, therefore, fearful of life. That is what led us to a sense that there is something—I don’t know if it is personal or if it is a great idea or powerful influence—but there is something that can bring meaning to my life. I certainly don’t have it, but it is there. On Sunday mornings, I hear that the answer is God.” Then Camus proceeded to trace the pilgrimage of biblical characters and so the biblical narrative over his own, concluding with the story of Nicodemus, a story whose words he knew by heart. The summers fly by these days and I am, no doubt, the poorer of spirit for having attended to the news rather than the stack of novels on my shelf. Nevertheless, Sunday after Sunday with few exceptions, by way of word and sacrament and song, this community has relentlessly traced the story that alone can change human hearts and minds, traced its equally confused characters over our own and over the bloody details of our free choices, such that we may know ourselves forgiven at great cost and given yet another season to seek him who has found us in Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God! |