THE GREAT OBLIGATION
by Galen Guengerich
October 3, 2004
The upcoming month will be a time of great controversy in our nation, as the candidates argue about the war and the economy, and citizens argue about the candidates, and everyone argues about the objectivity of the press and the reliability of voting machines. To adapt the famous saying about the ferocity of the natural world, we will see democracy red in tooth and claw. This ongoing debate has led me to examine our responsibility as people of faith and as citizens during this period. What are our rules of engagement?
Several months ago, Anna Quindlen wrote a column for Newsweek magazine titled "The Great Obligation." In it, she reflects upon the craft of journalism in an era when two star reporters—Jayson Blair of The New York Times and Jack Kelley of USA Today—have made their mark in part by concocting stories and inventing details. In the wake of these deceptions, Quindlen says, "Reporters are often asked about their obligation to readers, but perhaps the most important obligation is the one we owe the subjects of our stories." This obligation, she goes on to say, extends beyond getting the facts right to describing with understanding and respect the often-heartbreaking news about their lives. She adds, "All this makes you wonder if journalism schools should teach not just accuracy, but empathy."
For her part, Quindlen recalls the stories she wrote many years ago about Etan Patz, the six-year-old boy who twenty-five years ago vanished on the way from his family's lower Manhattan loft to the school bus stop two blocks away. No trace of him has ever been found. Quindlen says she has never forgotten those stories. "The couple's loss, their need, their grief, made me feel I had to lift the level of my game to meet the level of their bereavement. This was impossible, but I had to try." She realizes now that her stories and others have created a history for Etan, especially for his parents. So, she concludes, "If you're a reporter, I leave you with that image for those times when you think what you do is fleeting. The closest thing [his parents have] to the body of [their] son is the body of your work. If that doesn't make you want to do better, find another job."
Quindlen's point is that a reporter's highest obligation is neither to her readers, nor to factual accuracy alone, but to the people about whose lives she is writing. This does not require portraying them sympathetically, of course, especially if the subject is, say, a crook or a tyrant. But it does mean that a story is good because it authentically chronicles the life of the subject, and not just because readers like it, nor because the facts the journalist decides to include are correct.
I think Quindlen is right about journalism, but I'm also intrigued by her idea of a great obligation, a single overriding commitment—not just when writing newspaper stories, but in life generally. We live in a complicated world. In some situations, we find it hard to know what to do. It would be reassuring to know that we have one great obligation to fulfill, from which everything else follows. If we were plants, for example, our great obligation would be to turn toward the light. It is the one thing a plant can do by itself that makes everything else possible.
If human beings have one great obligation, what is it? Before I suggest an answer, it is worth pausing to note how seldom we talk about obligation here at All Souls. This is a liberal congregation, in the oldest and best sense of that term. The word liberal comes from an ancient word that describes a person who is free and not a slave. The defining characteristic of life in liberal democracies, both political and religious, is the freedom of each individual to decide what to believe and how to live. Bequeathed to us intellectually by John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers, our freedom of faith and conscience was forged in the fires of Europe's religious wars. Such freedom is possible only when we safeguard the freedom of every person, consistent with equal freedom for everyone else.
It is also worth noting, however, that freedom is not a roadmap to a happy and fulfilling life. In fact, freedom is more like the absence of a map, or perhaps the presence of a bewildering array of different maps, each leading by a different path to a different destination. You are free to choose which path is right for you. Along with the absence of a required path, of course, comes the absence of any guarantee that your path will lead where you hope it will. Such is the nature of freedom.
Given that freedom, while liberating, can also be disorienting, the reason we gather here at All Souls is to help us get our bearings. We need a compass to guide us on our journey, a standard we can use to evaluate our options. Thus, we're back to our question: if we wish to fulfill our destiny as human beings, what is our great obligation, our single overriding commitment from which all else follows? The answer must be an obligation that is distinctive to us as human beings, which rules out obligations that involve food, shelter, safety, and basic nurture. These we must have, of course, but so must many other living creatures. What is our unique commitment as human beings?
The traditional religious answer in our culture is easily stated: worship God. In the first of the Ten Commandments in the Hebrew Bible, God says to the children of Israel, "You shall have no other gods before me." In a similar vein, when Jesus was asked by a lawyer which is the great commandment in the law, Jesus replied, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment." In both cases, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures specify in some detail the implications of these commandments, as does the Koran, the scripture of the Muslim faith.
Our problem today is that the worship of God takes many forms, some of which are polymorphously perverse. Some of the most horrific violence in our world is either fueled or justified by people who invoke God's name. Our challenge, then, is to describe the great obligation in terms that embrace our longing for the eternal, yet remain a potent force for good in time and history.
During the debate on Thursday evening between President Bush and Senator Kerry, the harrowing situation in Iraq was understandably the focus of most of Jim Lehrer's questions. Both candidates, however, rightly identified nuclear proliferation, a threat posed most immediately by North Korea and Iran, as the most serious threat to our national security. As I listened to the discussion of whether the current imbroglio in Iraq was caused by too little planning or too rapid victory, my mind kept returning to a brief passage from an ancient book titled The Art of War. It was written nearly twenty-five hundred years ago by a Chinese warrior named Sun Tzu, during a time of protracted warfare and disintegration. Sun Tzu's insights into military strategy remain as influential among military leaders today as they were then.
The passage that came to mind has to do with knowledge of the enemy. Sun Tzu says, "So it is said that if you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle."
This passage comes at the end of a chapter on planning a siege. Victory is tenuous at best, according to Sun Tzu, unless you have a clear understanding of both yourself and your enemies. Soldiers are not just organic vessels for deploying portable weapons. They are human beings, each with their own loyalties and their own aversions. You need to know what they will flee from and what they will stand up to, what they will die for and at what cost they will surrender. You need to know what holds them together and what can drive them apart. You need to know the same things about yourself.
The ultimate strategy advocated by The Art of War is to use knowledge of yourself and your opponent in order to win without fighting, or if combat is ultimately necessary, to accomplish the most by doing the least. This approach is characteristic of Taoism, the ancient tradition of knowledge that fostered both the healing arts and the martial arts in China. In another Taoist classic, known as the Tao-te-Ching or The Way and Its Power, Lao-Tzu applies the same principle to human society that Sun Tzu applies to warfare. Lao-Tzu writes:
Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.According to the ancient sages, our great obligation as human beings is to understand ourselves and the people around us, whether they are friend or foe. The religious term for this kind of understanding is compassion, which literally means to bear with someone. Whether we engage in conflict with someone or make a home with them, whether we are designing a program to ease human suffering or passing a law to restrain human conduct, we need to bear with the people involved long enough and attentively enough to discover who they are, what they want, what they hope for and what they fear.
After saying that the great commandment is to love God, Jesus noted that the second commandment, which he said was equally important, is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. He also said, not coincidently, that we are to love our enemies. Lao-Tzu put it this way: "Patient with both friends and enemies [and] compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world." Simply stated, the great obligation requires that we engage with other people not as objects to be overcome, but rather as human beings who have their own beliefs, and hopes, and fears, and ambitions. Without understanding them in this way, nothing is possible—not victory, not a spirit of camaraderie, not a sense of community.
I wish to close this sermon on a pastoral note, one that will give us each an opportunity to put the great obligation into action. A number of you have spoken with me over the past few days and weeks about the upcoming election, and how differing political views have affected, sometimes in painful ways, your relationships with friends, colleagues, even other congregants here at All Souls. This tendency of relationships to fracture along political lines, while always present in key election years, seems more pronounced this time, perhaps because of the widely-held view that more is at stake.
Especially over the next few weeks, I hope all of us will remember two things. The first is that we do not come to All Souls because we all agree on religious doctrines, much less on political ones. This is a liberal congregation, where each individual is responsible to decide what to believe and how to live, as well as how to vote. In this spirit, I expect each of us to display the same openness of mind and generosity of heart when we touch on political matters as we do when discussing, say, the Bond of Union or the nature and existence of God.
The second is a plea that we take to heart the great obligation. Most of the people who disagree with you are not wild-eyed zealots of the left or right. They are simply responding as best they can to the challenges they have experienced in life. Our political views express what we strive for and what we are afraid of, what we are trying to protect and what we are defending against, what we are angry about and what we have given up on. The only hope anyone has of influencing our views is first to understand why we hold them. In other words, don't listen for the supporting argument, listen for the pain or the yearning behind it.
Our great obligation, the commitment from which everything else follows, is to turn toward the light—the light of knowledge, understanding, compassion, and even love. It is the one thing we can do that will make everything else possible.