Not Guilty, But Responsible

What Is Required of You, O Man?

Over the newsletters in October, I find that I’ve been trying to work out this question of what it means that we have moral agency. I’ve done it by looking at what it means that we act with deliberateness and patience, even when the scope exceeds our grasp; I’ve done it by asking the question of what it means to be a hero, and what it means for Christians to be embedded morally amidst any number of alternatives that we cannot hope to steer. The part of this whole question that bothers me is what to do in the event of acting faithfully for the good of another, even if it fails. It’s an existential question, to be sure, and I think that most parents asks about their own parenting, and one that I also ask about my own current work as Director of the Baptist Studies Center: it was born out of a true desire to give resources and help, and there are many times in these early months when I’ve wondered not similar to that dynamic of parenting.

So, in asking all these questions, one after another, about the limits of our agency, I had the most profound dream I’ve ever had, one in which I woke up feeling the weight of the dream world pulled through the dream and into the dawn. I wanted to write about it the next day, but ever since having it, I’ve not been entirely sure what it even meant. Perhaps you can sort it out. It went something like this:

I am somewhere around 14. I know this because the others in my dream are all around this age, some younger and some older, all boys as far as I recall. The night before the event, plans are made, and the kind of weapons that 14 year-olds in a rather prosaic kind of dream world can acquire are sought out. We plan, and stockpile, all spending the night in one of our compatriots’ house.

The ultimate object of our action is lost to the edges of the dream, but the heart of the action was clear: we were assaulting something which is unassailable. The next day, rather than go with them into the assault, I stay back in the house alongside two others. The planned assault goes badly, though none are hurt, and my compatriots retreat into the house, where they are arrested and dragged away by the police.

I had clearly been there in the planning, and was sympathetic to their actions, but because I had not taken part in any of the actions of the day, I was let go by the police. I don’t actually know if this is what happens in real life, but in the dream, non-participation meant a free ticket out. And then, I woke up.

Upon waking, I felt the heaviest, thickest feeling of shame that I have felt in probably twenty years: an almost grievous weight on my heart, the kind that makes your arms heavy. I had gotten away with something, though everyone knew that I was sympathetic to the assault, but by law, untouchable. As my friends were taken away, they were yelling at me, for I had stayed back in the moment of action.

Since that day, I’ve pondered off and on what the shame came from, and what it means. I’m one who can be prone to feeling guilt for something that is not mine, but in this case, it wasn’t that I had done anything wrong so much as been an intellectual accomplice. This dream is like a lot of things in our lives, caught up and affected by degrees in things which we do not effect: what Paul describes as “powers and principalities” have frequently been read this way. We are bound up in a common world, shaped as actors by other agents, and responsible to other people in our action, even while we cannot solve for the X of the equation.

So, back to the feeling of shame when I awakened. Upon reflection, I know that whatever action was being taken by my friends was one that I didn’t at some level agree with, or I would have gone (fear of action along with the crowd is one way that disagreement shows itself, I think, in that fear of doing something is an indicator that value something greater—my own liberty from punishment, my reputation, etc.—more than the action my friends invited me to take). And so, I think the police in the dream were right to name me as not guilty. But we were still entangled. I was never the one growing up to stand up and be counted; more often that not, I would pawn off my refusal to go along to do whatever thing it was on my parents’ disapproval than anything else, long on internal conviction but short on courage. And so, in this dream, the choices of others were theirs: their guilt of action was not mine, but it did not obviate my responsibility.

The quip from Abraham Joshua Heschel that “not all are guilty, but all are responsible” comes to me here to help provide this distinction: they are culpable in a way which I am not, but insofar as we are friends, we are bound together. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this is the upside to something like original sin: a common bond which enables both sin to spread is also the network by which the healing effects of grace to elevate. Though all fell in Adam, etc. And so, this dream and the heaviness I felt afterwards were not so much guilt I think as a sharing in their guilt through my sense of responsibility. I stayed behind, and in staying behind (whether out of fear or conviction, though these seem very close together to me sometimes), remained responsible to them even I did not share in their guilt.

And with that, the heaviness of the after-dream. I don’t feel this in real life, though in the weeks since the dream, I’ve speculated on why. There was something about the interconnectedness of the group in the dream that made it feel as if there was some thick bond, that staying behind—though the right thing to do—distended that bond such that the guilt that we should have shared equally now sagged between us, like wash on a clothesline, heavy and shapeless. That is, I think, the cost of being responsible for those for whom we love: we cannot share in their guilt, though we do share their burden. It is a great and holy thing to grieve in this way for the weight another incurs, even if you cannot bear it in your body.

Of course, there are many things which we are responsible, in our being Christian, to do. I tend to follow the line that our responsibilities multiply out as infinitely as our gratitude to God, but like the dream above, that tends to tie how I feel to whether or not it’s a good responsibility to have. It works the other way, I think: I don’t feel motivated to be responsible, but exercise responsibility and in doing so, learn to love and care that for which I am already responsible to, like the good of my neighbor. We rarely feel this, and it, I think, this lack of affect becomes a reason to then shirk what it self-evidently, or rather, theologically evident, that I am in fact obligated to. But I suspect that the dream is a reminder that the fact that I frequently don’t feel that weight may be not an indicator that my obligations are limited, but that my excuses for not taking up responsibility are manifold.