never know

If you gotta ask, you'll never know.

-- Louis Armstrong

Last American Who Knew What the F__k He Was Doing Dies

-- The Onion

I'm a consumer, and I know Steve Jobs loved me. I'm a consumer, and I know Steve Jobs didn't give a f__k what I think I want.

I never thought much about him until he died. But now I feel his love as I type on this keyboard. I feel it as I pick up this sleek, discretely shiny, tightly made flat box. I feel it every time I drop the box into my briefcase. It feels good to the hand, this box. I trust it to do what I want without fussing.

I feel the love of Steve Jobs as I look across my desk at another, even smaller shiny box, a box that answers the call of my Manhattan-apartment space problem, a tiny box that now contains my whole music collection, some one hundred fourteen gigabytes, almost forty-three days of sound, and promises to reproduce it through any convenient sound system, but will travel in my shirt pocket and deliver those same riches into the private depths of my ear if I ask it to do so.

Yes, in some militant outpost on the plain of corporate medianism, undistracted by the din of a thousand identical mission statements, someone dared to think clearly, ruthlessly about my happiness. Which is not to say that he asked me what I wanted. Why would he? How would I know? I'm just a consumer.

Thirty years ago I asked my friend, an actor who paid his rent by desktop publishing, why I would want a computer in my house. Now there are four computers in my house, and each of them fits in a shoulder-bag. And the ones I want, the ones that aren't foisted on me by employers, are the shiny boxes conceived by Steve Jobs. Because they do the work and feel good and are easy on the eyes, and they don't make trouble. When I use his machines, I don't feel like I'm working at the sufferance of techies; it seems rather that the techies have been put in their place, told to make me happy and then disappear. Ross Douthat writes this morning that "Jobs revived the romance of modernity."* It's like the old space operas: climb into your seat, turn the damn thing on and fly to Mars.

So what have we learned? that the good is enemy to the great. Not only in gadgetry but in art, in teaching, in prophecy, in preaching. If what you want is to ameliorate, smooth off the rough edges, squeeze another percentage point or two, avoid complaints -- here's what you do. You ask around. You take polls. You form focus groups. You make sure that you understand everybody's point of view. Then you write up the best practices, and train everybody to follow them, so there'll be no surprises.

That's what you do if you want to ameliorate. If you want to change things, well, that's a completely different matter ---

You can't invent what people already want. Somebody else already has that sewn up. You can only invent what people have no idea they want yet. Thomas Friedman says today that Jobs "was someone who did not read the polls but changed the polls."** He could change the polls because he knew what every great poet, preacher, leader knows -- that the public doesn't know what it wants until you show it to them.

There's plenty of room for predictability in the world: in business, in love and in faith. But predictability only gets you so far, particularly if you're in a deathly landscape. Rubbing off sharp edges and polishing surfaces won't prove satisfactory if you're living a catastrophe. If the hideousness around you is too strong, you may not even know it's killing you. Someone has to tear you out of your location and place you in a new landscape -- and you probably didn't know you wanted this. You wouldn't ask for it.

In the novels of Isaac Asimov, one travels the vastness between stars not at cruising speed but by violent hyperspace leaps. It isn't fun for the ship or for the people it carries. It takes some getting used to, and some would rather stay home. But if you don't learn to leap, you'll never leave your back yard.

To supervise the people is one thing, but to lead them is another. The prophet, the poet, the singer, the preacher -- such a person loves the people, with a vision of their better life and of how at this moment it might come to pass. But the vision cannot be found in a survey, or at the end of a course of audience research, or through the ministrations of a focus group. You'll find it together, if you find it at all, on the other side of a hyperspace leap, and no audience or congregation will ask for that. It's the artist's job to choose the place, the time and the direction of the leap.

Your public can't make this choice for you. Bless their hearts, they just can't. The moment you let them into your head, the moment you let them influence your choice with what they imagine are their desires, that is the moment when your prophetic gift begins to die. You must choose, and your choice will alienate someone. But if, at the end of your leap, you come down right together on the other side, then a new life appears and you learn what the glory of the Lord looks like. People will come back for that; and they will tell their friends.

I belong to a tiny religion with an outsized influence on what it means to be American. My teacher Gary Dorrien wrote the 1500-page history of American liberal theology,*** and his first two chapters are about us. Five of us have served as presidents of the United States. But in recent decades our membership stagnated, with meager annual increases that failed to keep up with population growth. And now, as the president of our association tells us, the numbers are falling. So after long delay we now suffer from the decline and implosion of mainline American religion.

I used to say that we were the only thing left of center in American religion that wasn't in decline; and that the reason we weren't declining yet is that we said out loud what liberal Christians could not say boldly without risking schism in their churches. Our message was clear, while Orthodoxy Lite failed to be a compelling message for liberal Christianity. Now however we are in decline ourselves, and this decline has begun at a time when most of our programming is about diversity and inclusiveness: we want to see in our churches more people of color and more people from outside the middle class.

Much will depend on how we pursue these dreams. If our drive for diversity turns us into a church of surveys, if we reduce our prophecy to an assurance that we don't mean to alienate anyone, if we become a church of edge-smoothers and surface-polishers, we shall not reverse the trend of the numbers. No demographic can tell us how, when or in what direction we must take the hyperspace leap. That is for preachers to decide.

Liberalism always offended someone. It was always meant to offend someone. When we stand courageously for the universal rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, when we condemn the use of some human beings for the luxury and pleasure of others, we make enemies. But that is also when we find our friends. Once upon a time before I was born America had a president who would "welcome the hatred" of those who lived luxuriously off the wretchedness of others. That president was elected to the office four times.

We are ultimately known, of course, by the quality of our friends. But our true friends often come to know us by our choice of enemies. We cannot afford to hate ourselves because some people don't care for us, or to shame ourselves for having a distinctive religious culture. If Orthodoxy Lite is not a compelling message, self-loathing is not an attractive quality. It isn't who we can get along with that will save us; our hope lies rather in what we are willing to risk for kindness and justice. And if you gotta ask, you'll never know.

*"Up From Ugliness," New York Times (October 9, 2011)

**"Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMiggio?" New York Times (October 9, 2011)

***Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press), 3 vols.

long run

In the long run we are all dead.

-- John Maynard Keynes

Never forgive. Never forget.

-- bumper sticker

Strange that I have not gone to Ground Zero. I work within a few blocks of the place. They say the new tower is half done, but I've never gone to see it. There's something that forbids me to approach. It doesn't belong to me.

First, it belonged to the residents. "This is our home. Tourists not welcome." The ones who lived there hung banners from their windows in those first weeks, as people came from all over, called to the altar of sacrifice with no good idea of what to do, but anxious to view the wreckage six stories high, the smoke that still floated over Brooklyn. At a later stage it belonged to the relatives of the dead. They came every year to read the names. But now it's been ten years. Ten readings of the names. It's time to turn the place over to the rest of us. Time to give us title to their dead. We lost them too.

They can read the names now any time they want. They've opened a memorial, and all the names are incised in concrete. The mourners don't have to wait for anniversaries.

A memorial is dedicated to memory. It tries to make sure we will never forget. But should we always remember?

Should we always remember the fireball? We've all seen that. Should we remember the people flying out of the buildings, smashing on the plaza? Very few if us saw that.

I saw the sacred ground the other day from across the street at fifty stories. One part like a model train layout, still too neat and needing to be distressed, with young trees set in rows in concrete, and two fountains marking the footprints of the vanished towers. Water pouring down the sides into a reflecting pool, and in the midst of the pool the water falls again into an inner depth. The rest of the ground looks like what it is. A construction site. It's a mess. It looked small from fifty stories. I suppose when I go there in person, on the floor of the plaza, it will seem very large.

From fifty stories I could look across the street into the new "No. 1," the replacement for what came down that day -- they used to call it "Freedom Tower." It looked as if I could reach across the space and touch it. I was dizzy. I felt as if I were flying among tall buildings and, yes, it was thrilling and it was appalling. I could see the ground as the flying people had seen it.

How long do those who grieve have to spend a part of each day curating the injury? Tearing off the dressing and picking at the scab? Some hold themselves to a standard: never forget and never forgive. It's as if forgiveness would betray the dead; by prolonging the pain they prolong the lives of the dead. And it works. As long as you hold the lost person before you, that person still hovers there -- not gone yet. We're willing to cherish the grief and the rage in order to postpone the loss. These dead are therefore still falling: they haven't hit ground yet. They are suspended in a gelatin of aggressive memory. The mourners still hope the film will reverse, the flying people soar upward into their towers, the flames go out, the airplanes reintegrate and fly backward to their airports.

For each mourner, the suspension will either last or it won't. For some, the gelatin will suddenly dissolve, and the dead person will strike the pavement of reality, and the long work of loss will begin. Others will succeed in sustaining the suspension for years, decades, their whole lives, keeping the dead before them until they themselves die. But they will have spent their days out of the world, in suspense.

I can't tell anyone to forgive. It's too hard, when no remorse has been expressed. There was, to say the least, no remorse about Ground Zero. And I'm no example: there are people I haven't forgiven. I'm more interested in forgetting.

I'm glad I have not needed to grieve for many people. But I've grieved for dreams, for opportunities, for images of myself. I have felt aggrieved, in ways that would hurt for months or years. But there would come a day when I noticed that, for some days now, a week, a month, I had not thought about that loss, or about the person I held responsible for it. I didn't have time for that hurt any more. I was interested in other things. I had forgotten. I was free of the injury. I didn't want what I had long ago lost.

It takes time to arrive at this forgetting. And it takes time to arrive at the next station. Once I have forgotten, once the injury doesn't hurt any more, I think about how I might have avoided it. If I had done this rather than that, zigged rather than zagged, then the adversary might not have done what she did. And then I begin to take responsibility. I start writing a new story of how I "played into" a situation of malice. If I had behaved with more savvy, I might have managed the situation differently, and the injury might not have happened. So I begin to think of the terrible event as something we worked on together, the enemy and me. Next time I'll know better. Perhaps this is a kind of forgiveness.

But there wasn't any better way at Ground Zero; the people in the towers didn't "play into" their destruction. They didn't know what was coming, or who. So how could I tell them to forgive? "Never forgive. Never forget." It's just that never is a long time, and life is not a long time.

A great economist spoke of the business cycle's supposedly creative destruction, and of the hymns of market fundamentalism, incantations that assure, no matter how severe the crash, that a rebound will follow. Yes, but when? Theoreticians can wait for the long-run fulfillment of perfect curves. But people, families, children and their hopes cannot wait for the long run. There isn't time in the human scale for the market to restore itself. Our youth, our innocence, our life is over before the loss can be made up. The market expresses no remorse to those whom its breathing destroys.

For the last ten years I lived among trees. I got to know individuals through my windows and on my daily strolls. I knew their leaves and branches, and I have seen many storms rip trees apart. When nature rips a limb off, the tree never recovers its loss, never resumes the profile that I knew. But new buds form, and new limbs sprout, and a new profile replaces the old. Never the same, but still alive and even larger.

So here I am, late as usual, three weeks after the tenth memorial of our great loss. I just can't stop chewing things over, so I have to keep processing long after everybody else has moved on to the next topic. Another reason why this is not a blog.

And these words are a dismemorial. For those who lost people ten years ago, I wish a forgetting. I hope they learn how to live a day without recalling the hurt. I hope their lives will outlast the injury. They'll never be the same, but they can still be alive and larger. I won't tell them that they ought to forget. But I can hope.

sweet prince

Now cracks a noble heart.

-- Hamlet

Alabaster Huston, who rose from humble origins to become a mentor for his peers, an explorer of streams and forests, a protector of homes, a loving friend and a counselor to counselors, died peacefully on Friday, with family gathered round him at his home in New York City, after a long illness. Named "Alabaster" by his adoptive family because of his uniform white coat, he was orphaned and spent formative stages of childhood in a rescue shelter. He won the family's invitation with his fervently expressed wish to adopt them as companions, reaching his paw through the mesh of his cage.

As he grew to maturity, his character was unaffected by the trauma of early childhood. Neither shy nor excessively demonstrative, he was described by many who met him as having "a great attitude." His interests were catholic and inclusive, and he was never willingly left out of an activity, rushing to find vantage points from which to observe household or public events without once being killed by his curiosity. He displayed a remarkable comprehension of the mechanics of door-latches, and it is understood that if he had possessed opposable thumbs he would now rule the world, or at least have led a Fortune 500 company.

He was companionable with a characteristic reserve, declining to sit on the laps even of his intimates, but preferring instead to stretch on the couch beside a friend, exerting light pressure on the thigh with all four feet. He was perfectly capable however of soliciting affection at the appropriate time, reaching up to touch a face or a forearm with a gesture whose meaning was: "It's time for you to pet me now." Many who knew him wish they could be as clear in their communication, or as effective.

Though he never practiced ministry he consorted all his life with pastors, and they often thought that, had he chosen to pursue such a career, he would have done well in it. His ways were quiet and his voice was small, but he chose his utterances carefully and displayed excellent listening skills. Comfortable with silence and clear in his boundaries, he put all at their ease and comforted many during his career with a truly pastoral presence.

Though his heart was firmly anchored in the home, he always enjoyed the outdoors. As a child growing up in the suburbs he investigated the perspectives available from garage roofs and from the upper reaches of grape trellises, conducting research from those locations on avian behavior and the domestic habits of squirrels. He spent most of his adult life however in a home located amidst forests, ridges and miniature streams. This wild and constantly changing terrain called him irresistibly, and he would sometimes take a walk through the woods with a family member, lagging behind or running ahead as his curiosity might prompt him, checking in by voice with his companion just at the moment when he seemed to be lost.

His frequent solo expeditions in nature were sometimes rewarded with zoological discoveries. He would return with an enlistee for home athletic events, carefully preserved from harm and voicing its enthusiasm from the jaws of its recruiter -- a mouse or a mole or, on one memorable occasion, a baby bunny. That these guests were uniformly unharmed when members of his family returned them to the environment is a testament to his innately gentle disposition. Nature was not in his view, at least his part of it, red in tooth and claw.

His habit of peaceful play with the smaller creatures of his world sets one of his last actions in remarkable relief. About a week before he died, although much weakened by his disease, he caught, killed and ate a mouse who had invaded his city home. His younger feline apprentice stood by in amazement, to see his elder display such determination. It is hoped that this vivid example of domestic protectiveness will serve the youth as a model, in the course of an urban future.

Alabaster's remains will be cremated, and his family will devote his ashes at a suitable time to a location that suits his interests and affections. Good night, sweet prince.

juggle this

There will be time. There will be time.

-- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Most preachers are musical, but many of them keep it under wraps. During a party at his house, I learned that one of my pastors was an excellent sight-reading piano player. He claimed no lofty view of his abilities, but I've auditioned, or sung for my supper, with many who weren't as good.

I've learned from a third person that another preacher I know is an excellent juggler. I won't ask him to demonstrate. It's his gift to reveal or conceal. The point is, pastors often have a physical art that underlies their words.

I'll never be a juggler. I know this to be true because I tried for years. But I learned by trying.

I had my first physical education at the age of twenty-five.

Oh yes, there was gym class. Lining up to shoot baskets, under the eye of a disappointed jock who asked God why his life had come to this, watching nerds fail at what he could do but could not, would not teach. There was one of him at every school. My presence insulted him; his despair marked me.

But that is not what I mean by physical education. It's far too rare; nerds like me may go through a lifetime without getting any. I was lucky enough, prescient enough, to find my way into a training course for the theatre, and to find a master who helped me learn to live in my body.

It was, of course, too late. It's like languages -- there's a time of life, very young, when you can pick things up, easy as breath, but if you miss that time it will never be simple. When my teacher came round to his brief juggling lesson, many of the eighteen-year-olds within minutes had their three-ball cascades in the air. It took me three months of obsessive practice to do the same thing. I was by far the last, and by the time of my breakthrough the class had long gone on to other matters. Most in my situation would have given up. Note to therapist: I did not.

These are now my limits (I know this because I spent years trying to exceed them). I can keep two balls in the air with one hand. Or three balls in the air with two hands. I can do a few simple variations of the pattern. I cannot keep five balls in the air. Or four. I cannot pass behind my back. I cannot pass under my leg. I cannot juggle clubs.

Why should clubs be an absolute barrier? Because they move in two dimensions at once. Not only do they follow the arc from one hand to the other, but they rotate head over base, and the neck of the club must come round to your palm just as the clubs falls to your hand. I could never get this co-ordination. This crippled body, ostracized in the time when it might have learned, this body that spent months learning to feel one of the motions accurately, was permanently baffled by the task of bringing two motions into phase.

And yet despite these limits, in the few motions that have been revealed to me there is spiritual truth. Without this corporeal knowledge I could never have sung for my supper, nor could I preach.

It's the essence of juggling that you're going to have more than one thing in the air all the time. Each of these objects, for most of the time, is out of your control. But you must not panic. You have to let go.

Take a ball in your hand. Throw it into the air before you, about as high as your chin. Try not to watch yourself catch it.

Take two balls in one hand, and throw one into the air, in an arc that rises up your center line and falls out to your side. As it reaches the high pont, throw the other on the same path. As the second one goes over the top, catch the first and throw it again. You're juggling. (Three balls are actually simpler, because you have two hands to manage them, taking turns.)

Now here's the problem. As soon as you've released the first ball, you have to refocus on releasing the second. And I didn't want to refocus. I'd been taught, I had absorbed, I could not let it go of, the Protestant ethic of ceaseless hard work. When I threw the first ball, I had to follow it with the eye and mind all the way through its arc and into my hand. Anything else was dereliction of duty. The theology of a nerdly body assured me that the moment I thought of something else would be the moment of my failure: Satan and my gym teacher would then rejoice in my well-deserved humiliation, a failure not only physical but moral as well.

But now, in my master's juggling lesson, I faced a fruitful contradiction. I had to release each ball not only with the hand but with the mind. If I did not let go, if I did not derelict my duty, I would fail. I had to learn how to do what my body protested was the wrong thing, letting the object flung from my hand proceed unsupervised on its way. How could I ever find it again?

What was required of me was faith. The hand, the eye and the mind have plenty of wisdom to find each other: two hands are sufficient to keep three, five, seven objects flying, if each hand does its work at the right time. But faith had long left my body, flying from the eyes of despairing gym teachers, and it took months for me to start recovering it.

I learned to see the ball's complete trajectory in the act of releasing it, and then to forget, so that I could then turn my attention to the next event, even while the consequences of my previous throw revealed themselves. I learned to trust that things would work out even though I didn't know how; because if I did not trust, things would not work out.

The terrible thing about getting your physical education too late is that there are so many things you will never learn to do. The miracle of it is that you know exactly what you have learned.

I learned that there was time enough. Time enough to rest, and take the next action. Time enough, if I would make the time. Time enough, if I turned with empty hand from the already past event, toward the future as it came to me. I learned to detach because if I did not detach I would fail. I failed a thousand times before I began to succeed. And then the mountain of my doubt began to move.

They say that if a thing is yours you should let it go and, if it belongs to you, it will come back. Juggling is like that. Also love. Love of children, or lovers or friends, poems or songs. The beauty shines back on us from things we give up.

becoming powerful

If he were God, he would keep reversing the victories -- which, moreover, is what God does!

-- Roland Barthes*

What will you do

If you find yourself in Egypt

Where your labor is stolen

And fed as the greatest of delicacies

To those who beat you for sport

While maligning your character

If you cry out to the Lord

(or whatever there is to be cried to)

And the Lord hears your suffering

And raises a Moses among you

To take you away from all this

What will you do when the tables are turned

And believe me the tables will turn

Before you are ready

In some corner of the parade

Some eddy in the stream of power

Some place where no one can see you

No news cameras roll

And no anchormen wait to report your iniquity

What will you do when (surprise)

You are head of the committee

Or maybe just the subcommittee

Or chief of police

Or the bursar

As soon as you can get away with it

What will you do

For God has chosen sides

And you are on God's side

Congratulations to the poor but damn you rich

Every valley shall be exalted and every hill made low

So now you're exalted

And what will you do

For God loves you

What will you do when the Promised Land calls

And you cross the great river to take the possession

Of what you were told you deserve

Will you tumble those Jericho walls

On people whose crimes are

first to live there before you were chosen

(chose) to live there yourselves and

second to name their God by a different name

Will you charge on a horse and with sabre

Tepees of women and children

To music of fife and drum

Singing your victory for history

Awarding medals in memory

Will you build a new temple

Of stolen labor

Is your freedom just a crank

Of the vengeance wheel

Up and then down

Going and coming round

And smacking from behind

This is the trap on the Wilderness Highway

This is the IED on the road to freedom

This is the sin in liberation's heart

Ready to break and to clot the body

All tyrants think themselves aggrieved

They say they just want Lebensraum

And not to be fenced in

They say this is their due

For what they (and you) have suffered

Read back a chapter or two

Our sufferings are notes of history's song

We all have cause for vengeance

If you read back a chapter or two

But the Kingdom is not a schedule for taking turns

And the Promise is not a balance sheet

Comfort the afflicted afflict the comfortable

Saith the Lord

But the tables can turn at a moment's notice

And we are quickly afflicted or comfy

We might already

Have received our reward

If God has taken sides

Then God can change sides

At a moment's notice

The up and the down is not justice

The turning must stop

And the Wheel must come to rest

And we must lay it on its side

There are no special cases

That's what the Creator says

Paupers and princes

Werden Brüder

All created equal

No special rights

Not my freedom right or wrong

But freedom under God

*Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 46-7

long tryout

Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

-- Milton, Lycidas

The Bronx is up but the Battery's down.

-- Betty Comden

I've never lived on this island before. Like any immigrant, I have my dreams but I don't know quite what to expect. My work is already here. Many of my friends are here. A lot of my fantasies are here. They say that if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

Of course, you're supposed to come here as a tap-dancing ingenue from the stix. But I never tap-danced, and I learned to sing for my supper in other parts of the country. No longer young, I came to the island and got work, and as I worked I learned that I didn't like doing this work any more. So I went to school again and became a pastor, living all the while in the suburbs. Deep suburbs.

I lived in those suburbs on eight and a half acres of woods. I've watched storms that tore off limbs and hurled one trunk at another, leaving the field swathed in casualties. On the other side, I've seen a shoot grow out of a pine stump to three times my height. I knew every tree, the crossings of the marsh, the splittings and meldings of a tiny river and its tributaries. My kitty and I could take walks on the place. How will we deal with the loss? It's a new life, but also a death. The move makes real a fantasy; but it also is a grief, for I leave what I love.

I had a client on the eleventh floor of a building only a block or two away from where I shall live. He was 101 years old and had been blind for a decade, but he told me what I would see if I looked out his window. I might have seen my new home. It's on the ridge of the island, which slopes up gently on the west and down precipitously on the east. In the plain below the bluff, the Polo Grounds once stood, where Willie Mays made fabulous catches. Across the Harlem River used to stand the house that Ruth built, torn down so that millionaires can have luxury boxes. If I choose to reward their vandalism, I might walk across a bridge to the expensive imitation just up Jerome Avenue.

Half an hour from here by subway are the famous museums on the even more famous park. "Is it safe?" the tourist lady asks with two kids in tow. Yes, it's safe: there are shows and games and concerts, and walkers and runners and cyclists, and people cross the park every day, emerging on the other side unharmed.

I've gone to school here, worked here for eight years. I've climbed in and out of subways, mounted and dismounted from buses, and said, "I ought to live here. I feel like I live here. But I don't live here. It will take me an hour and half to get home." Traveling from one client to another on the West Side, I've said to myself, these are my people. Some of my work will now be a few blocks away from my front door. If I go to a show or out to dinner, I can come home and change clothes, take a shower. Leave off my heavy, even heavier-looking, laptop bag.

There's a part of me that's all a-quiver to come here at last. If you make it here you can make it anywhere. As a juvenile I thought I would come here to conquer the stage, looking forward to triumphs in Shakespeare and Chekhov, which were the only forms of showbiz I could imagine succeeding in. But I never came here, since I couldn't imagine how to make a living. Turns out I did learn to sing for my supper, but not here or anywhere close to here, and my songs were a long way from classical, sung in a country where no one knows that actors can live. I stood in for cops and truck-drivers, farmers and befuddled American dads, in commercials and training films and trade shows and syndicated TV. I'm no ingenue hoping to tap dance her way down Forty-Second Street. I'm not a star. I'm not going to be a star. I'm not even in showbiz. But I have made it here: I have a job and a place to live, though like Milton's shepherd I must find "other groves and other streams." After the longest of try-outs, I've come to New York, and I've got a piece of the town. The Bronx is up but the battery's down.

unoriginal sin

Few are guilty but all are responsible.

-- Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets

We don’t choose how, when or where we come into the world. We don’t choose our social locations, they’re not our fault. Heidegger said we are geworfen (thrown) here; and wherever we stop rolling, there we are. Whichever of our faces first sees light, that’s how people first will take us; and we’re reacting before we’ve fully entered the scene.

It’s not that our course is predicted, but that the range of chance is specific to our point of insertion in the world. It’s as if we fall like raindrops on one side or other of a continental divide, and the courses of the other watershed are not ours. But there seem to be many divides, many compartments and containers of our long fall to the sea.

In any case, I’m not to blame for my social location. Nor are you. I am responsible for how I comport myself in my course; but I am not guilty of deciding to be what I am. Just look at me: signally white and male, blond and blue-eyed, genteelly poor, educated beyond utility, mentally precocious, emotionally withdrawn and physically awkward. These are characteristics of the location in which I first appeared, a combination of my genes and my upbringing, too late to be undone now. I can revolt, but the plot of my revolt is chosen, its scenario written. I can improve myself by filling in my deficiencies, but my leading attributes continue to lead.

A friend said, “My presence precedes me.” Wherever she goes, she steps into assumptions. Her part in the scene is already written and other actors are in motion before she gets both feet on stage. She is younger than I and female and black. I wear authority casually, but she wears it deliberately. Our styles matter not: our particular music has been heard before our words and deeds. There will be some who like my music, and some will like hers. But in either case some will not like it. We are both in trouble before we begin.

I once lived in a house that had settled for two hundred years, and all its floors sloped toward the central chimney. You couldn’t put a marble down anywhere -- it would roll down the incline. The world is like that, not fallen as the ancients said but warped by history. There are no level floors. There’s no neutrality; you have to hold the marble in place, or else it rolls. And that’s why justice is so difficult. The goddess is supposed to be blind-folded, but in what world could that work? she must see how the floors are warped before she can make fair decisions.

Abstract equality alone could not liberate my brothers and sisters of African descent. The floors were too warped in favor of people who look like me, who had inheritances and educational credentials and family histories and cultural capital. To keep all the marbles from rolling into their accustomed places, we undertook compensatory practices that go under the name of Affirmative Action. Some of our black neighbors say that these actions did a lot of good; but others are uneasy about mandates that isolate them as particularly helpless Americans. It’s awkward. Nothing we can actually do is exactly right. There’s no progress for oppressed people without special efforts -- Smith’s “invisible hand” doesn’t serve this purpose.

Nothing we can actually do is exactly right. My country is now making choices about intervention in a so-called country called Libya, a scene of murder and violence. None of the options were very good. All were potentially disastrous, politically and morally. Niebuhr would remind us that doing nothing is no escape from unpleasant choices. Doing nothing is just another of the nasty options for which we will face judgment.

And this is what the theologians have so badly botched by naming it original sin -- this feeling that no matter what we do, it’s not exactly right, and could be horribly wrong. Though all of us are commanded to be just, none of us is worthy to represent justice. But we are not guilty of our imperfection. The wrongness of the world is not in us but in its sculpting by what has always already transpired. Our teeth are on edge because of the sour grapes our parents bit into. And they in turn may have done the best they could in a world already set on bias. So on and so forth.

I did not enslave anybody, nor did I lynch anyone, nor ever set out to deny others their rights. I am not one of Heschel’s few who are guilty. But I am responsible. And what is this responsibility? To love kindness, do justice and walk humbly.

If I am to walk humbly, I cannot expect that I will rid the world of injustice. I might help to dismantle a particular racist system, for instance; but I cannot end racism any more than I can end greed or power-lust. The possibility of sin in a slanted world will never disappear; and our souls are in greatest peril when we think we can end sin.