A READINESS FOR RESPONSIBILITY
by Galen Guengerich
October 26, 2003
A parable is a short, simple story used to illustrate a moral attitude or religious principle. Parables are usually fictional, but unlike fables, they are also true to life. Parables can be found in Zen Buddhism and Islamic mysticism, as well as in the Hebrew Bible. But the parables that are best known to Western readers are those told by Jesus in the New Testament Gospels. In fact, scholars believe the parables are the oldest and most historically accurate Jesus material in the New Testament.
Parables often raise as many questions as they answer, because the stories tend to be enigmatic and evocative. For example, Jesus once told this parable: "The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches." That is the entire parable. The challenge for listeners is to interpret the parable for their everyday lives.
My sermon this morning contains four modern day parables. Although the stories happen to be true, they also have an enigmatic quality that makes them parable-like. The first is a baseball story that most fans will remember long after they forget that the Florida Marlins beat the Yankees in the World Series. It is about a 26-year-old named Steve Bartman, a Chicago Cubs fan. Less than two weeks ago, the Cubs were playing the Marlins to win the right to represent the National League in the World Series. Bartman, a lifelong Cubs fan, was sitting in a front row seat along the left field line at Wrigley Field. In the eighth inning of what could have been the deciding game of the series, with the Cubs leading 3-1, Bartman reached out and deflected a fly ball that the Cubs left fielder probably would have caught. Instead of being the second out of the inning, the batter subsequently reached base. The momentum of the game shifted, and the Marlins scored seven runs before the inning ended. The Marlins won the game, as well as the deciding one the next evening, which is why the Marlins instead of the Cubs played the Yankees in the World Series.
Taken in isolation, Bartman’s action was wholly innocuous, even trivial. He reached out and tried to catch a fly ball. He could have been doing something else–taking a bite of his hot dog, watching the fielder, taking a photo, or looking down to check his score card. Instead, he was focused on the ball as it came toward him, and he reached out and deflected it. It has now been 59 years since the apparently ill-fated Cubs have been in the World Series.
The second story centers on another set of apparently innocuous actions, though with consequences that are much more tragic. While the details of the Staten Island Ferry crash remain sketchy, it seems clear that the ferry’s pilot, Assistant Captain Richard Smith, had for some reason lost control of the boat. It also seems clear that the ranking officer on board, Captain Michael Gansas, was not in the pilot house, which is where he should have been as the ferry approached the terminal. Why was he not at his assigned station? There may be a sinister explanation for his absence, but let us assume for the moment that there is not. Maybe Gansas was talking with another crew member about his daughter’s soccer game the afternoon before, or finishing up some paperwork, or picking up a cup of coffee, or checking something down on deck. Gansas eventually reached the pilothouse, but he arrived when the ferry was, say, fifty yards from the dock instead of five hundred yards.
Why should this have been a problem? Indeed, why would Gansas even think about whether or not there would be a problem? Smith had docked the ferry countless times in recent years without incident. If my conjecture is correct, Gansas probably arrived back in the pilot house about 45 seconds later than he should have–probably for no particular reason. He just happened to be 45 seconds late. Ten people died as a result.
When was the last time you or I were 45 seconds late for something? When was the last time we instinctively reached out a hand to catch something or steady ourselves? Did we stop to consider what the worst imaginable consequence of our action could be? When I am waiting in front of the church garden to cross Lexington Avenue for a cup of coffee, I don’t think about whether a passing driver will catch a glimpse of my brightly colored tie, turn his head for a closer look, and, while distracted for a moment too long, veer slightly to the right, pushing a bicycle messenger into the adjacent lane, causing a bread truck to swerve and lose control, so that it runs the red light at 79th Street and hits a concrete truck that careens across the yellow line and crashes head-on into a cross-town bus. We live our lives by assuming that most of our decisions and actions do not matter all that much, and that the ones that do matter will declare themselves beforehand. The disconcerting element in these two stories is the innocuous moment that appears to matter little, but ends up mattering a lot.
Truth be told, any one of us could probably have done what Bartman or Gansas did, or didn’t do. We are all sometimes careless, or absentminded, or forgetful, which brings us to our third parable. In his book Freedom Evolves, the philosopher Daniel Dennett tells about a young father who forgot to drop off his infant daughter at her day-care center on his way to work. She spent the day locked in his car in a hot parking lot. When he returned to his car, she was still strapped into her little car seat in the back seat, dead.
Dennett goes on to say that he knows nothing more about this young father. While it is conceivable that he is a callous human being who deserves to be despised, it is also conceivable that he is basically a good person, a victim of cosmically bad luck. For Dennett, who describes himself as notoriously absentminded, the unsettling question is: could I ever do anything like that? He says, "I replay the scene with many variations, imagining distractions–a fire engine racing by just as I am about to turn off to the day-care center, something on the radio reminding me of a problem I have to solve that day,… a friend asking me for help as I get out of my car... Could such a series of distracters pile up and bury my overriding project of getting my daughter safely to day care? … I am thankful that nothing like this has yet confronted me, because I do not know that there are no circumstances in which I could do what this young man did. Such things happen all the time."
Indeed, they do. Occasionally, something that appears not to matter at all turns out to matter hugely. The challenge, presumably, is to try to identify these moments before they happen. The problem is that we can almost never do that. Which is why we need a different interpretation of these parables. Instead of showing that trivial things sometimes matter a lot, perhaps these stories illustrate how much everything matters, even small things. Perhaps our error is in assuming that when consequences are not close at hand or dramatic, there are none.
For example, when an airliner crashes and a hundred or more people die, we respond with anguish at such a significant loss of life. But when someone dies in an auto accident, no one except friends and family of the victim pays much attention. Yet more than forty thousand people a year die in car crashes–roughly the equivalent of two jumbo jets going down every week. Imagine our response if that happened. Because auto deaths are dispersed by time and geography, they do not appear to matter as much. But to those who are directly affected, every death matters equally.
The same principle holds in the rest of life. All of our actions have consequences that are substantial and enduring. Most of the time, either because the consequences are distant from us, or because they are combined with the consequences of lots of other people’s actions, we do not see them up close, in sharp relief. But once in a while, something happens that reminds us that everything we do matters, without exception. It may not matter to us, or here, or now, but it matters.
The question is how we view our relationship to the stream of events that make up our lives. Are we mostly bystanders, capriciously rewarded or defeated by events over which we have little control? Or do we have some active role to play? On this question, I am reminded of a remark once made by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who was executed by the Nazis for his role in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler. In May of 1944, about a year before his execution, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter from a Nazi prison, in which he acknowledges how little control we ultimately have over the events that shape our existence. He talks about how his parents and grandparents believed they could plan, develop, and shape their lives. They believed that each life has a purpose, about which individuals have to make up their minds, then pursue with all their strength. But the experience of his generation was different. He says, "We have learnt by experience that we cannot plan even for the coming day, that what we have built up is being destroyed overnight, and our lives, in contrast to that of our parents, has become formless or even fragmentary."
The appropriate response to the unpredictable nature of life, according to Bonhoeffer, is not to sit around pondering what it means. "We have spent too much time in thinking," he insists. Bonhoeffer concludes, "We have learnt, rather too late, that action comes not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility."
This is the key: whatever the situation, our actions should reveal a readiness for responsibility. Whether we are talking with colleagues at the office, or standing alongside Lexington Avenue, or taking our children to school, or enjoying a baseball game, the issue is whether we are ready for the responsibility of living in that situation. Everything we do matters, without exception. It may not matter to us, or here, or now, but it matters.
Which leads us to our fourth and final parable, which I discovered in a recent New Yorker article titled "Jumpers," about people who commit suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The article describes an interview with Jerome Motto, a now-retired psychiatrist who had been part of two failed efforts to have suicide barriers constructed on the bridge. Motto had two patients who committed suicide from the bridge, and it was the second death that most affected him. Motto said, "I went to this guy’s apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner. The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’"
For the want of a smile, a life was lost. None of the people who met that young man as he walked to the bridge had any idea of what was at stake. This is true for most of us, most of the time. We do not know what is at stake. For the most part, we never will. Which is why a readiness for responsibility is so important. No matter how inconsequential our everyday actions may be to us, they matter to someone, somewhere, somehow. It matters whether we smile, or buy this product, or support that policy, or agree, or disagree, or call, or write, or help, or hope, or love, or forgive. Everything matters. Near the end of his life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way: "There remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to find, of living every day as if it were our last, and yet living in faith and responsibility as though there were to be a great future." These are wise words, well worth remembering.