by Rev. Robert Schaibly, Summer Minister

A sermon given August 12, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Atheism is the subject of several books this year, and it figures in the obituaries of the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman.  Some of you who took my ethics course a couple of years ago may recall our viewing of Bergman’s movie, The Seventh Seal.  It is the story of a disillusioned medieval knight and his squire on their way back home from the Crusades.  The hero wants assurance that life holds meaning, but the title refers to a period of time described in the Book of Revelation when God was silent, and Bergman often indicated that that time is now.  The film’s protagonist tries to find a meaningful deed to do, and when he comes across a near-dead young woman about to be burned at the stake as a witch—she confessed she was a witch when the monks broke her hands—the knight gives her a potion to stop her pain.  This and other deeply felt moments help him face death with some positive memories to redeem his having gone on the Crusades.

Some of you here today are theists, and believe that there are many, many ways we might define God.  “Two Unitarians, three opinions.”  A philosopher-friend says, “It seems there must be a creator, but why would any non-physical reality bother with physical reality?”  Then there’s the opinion of the American comedian Lily Tomlin, who says, “It seems God may have forgotten about us.”

I like the theism our senior minister shows for its dynamic tension.  In a sermon, Marilyn Sewell said that in the morning she sits and has a dialog that begins, “What’s next, God?”  This invites a plan for the day (or the week or month or even year); a plan that is much loftier than a mere “To Do” list.  Asking God what the next thing God wants heightens one’s religious sensibility and then applies it to the issues of our time.  God wants love, justice, humility, and joy, and the person who meditates on God’s will for the world will find ways to bring it about.  “What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justice, love, mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.” 

But not all find God-talk or God-thought meaningful.  Sigmund Freud, perhaps the greatest atheist of the 20^th century, wrote a book about religion titled The Future of an Illusion.  Many Unitarian Universalists find the question about the existence of God no longer important and instead deal with the question of how am I going to live my life and be good?

My favorite atheist thinker cares deeply about ethics and reveals a great love for the world.  His name is Albert Camus and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 1957.  Camus remains one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century; a member of the existentialist movement.  He wrote The Stranger, about an alienated man.  He wrote the Myth of Sisyphus, about the ancient Greek hero who is condemned to roll the rock up the mountain, watch it roll back down, and then do it again.  Just as I feared, this is the metaphor for those of us who seek world peace and social justice.  No benefit is ever gained once and for all!

And he wrote The Plague—another favorite of mine—about a community in crisis and under quarantine.  I read The Plague when I was in college and it allowed me to understand myself as religious again. The protagonist is Dr. Rieux, a physician who lives and works in a city quarantined because of a plague.  He is tireless and committed to working to relieve human suffering, and at some point those around him tell him how much they admire his deep faith, having assumed he is a devout Christian.  He replies: “I am an atheist; there is no reason for believing in God. But being an atheist does not mean one cannot be committed to alleviating human misery, and to being loyal to the human race.”  At that time in my life that was what I needed to hear in order to be validated, or affirmed, as a good person.

That book allowed me to feel confident that I was religious in spite of thinking there was no God as the Bible presents him, nor as over 90% of the American public define him; some believers may have in mind the God painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  In Unitarianism it is OK to build one’s own theology, to let go of that which no longer serves one well, and still hold onto what does—such as Judeo-Christian ethics—that inspires us and leads us forward.  We may define ourselves as religious because of feelings such as awe, wonder, reverence, love, and justice, among others. 

Reading Albert Camus brings me a sober happiness that feels in touch with reality.  He died young in an auto accident in 1960, leaving behind a rough draft of an autobiographical novel titled The First Man.

Camus was critical of the French government for waging war in Algeria and he knew a lot about what was called “The Algerian Question.”  He had been born in Algeria, and he hoped that there might be a multicultural community—just imagine coexistence!—with civil liberties for all.  What an idealist!

This novel, The First Man, is the story of his life.  He was born to settlers in Algeria, which was colonized by France as a way to get the unemployed out of Paris and working again.  Desperation and hope took them to Algeria.  Understandably the native Arabs were sometimes hostile.

His father was conscripted into the French Army and was killed in 1914 fighting for France, a nation he had never lived in.  Camus was one year old.  His mother had to take her two sons and go home to her mother and brother who shared a small apartment in Algiers.  She found work as a laundress.  She and her sons shared a small bedroom.

But poverty was only the beginning of it.  Camus’ mother was nearly deaf.  Her brother had a speech defect.  The grandmother was a woman of no learning and little imagination.   Grandmother ran the household and brutally disciplined Camus.  She beat him whenever he came home with scuffed shoes that betrayed his love for schoolyard soccer.  All three adults in the house were illiterate.  There were no newspapers, no radio, and no books except those he brought home from the library.  There were no vacations.

Still, Camus loved his mother. She spent most of her free time sitting by the window looking out.  Her smiles were sad ones. When a man began to pay attention to her and she blossomed a bit—cut her hair and dressed in prettier clothes—her brother put a halt to it.

And in spite of all this Camus learned; he learned to ask the big questions about what it means to love, what it means to be an emigrant, a refugee, to be poor, to be uneducated.  Somehow he developed a passion for life and he learned to love.

And this, his last manuscript, his autobiographical novel, is dedicated this way:

             To you who will never be able to read this book

By this he meant his mother and members of his family, among the others in this world, who have had no opportunities to learn to read.

It is the story of growing away from his family and his home through full participation in the educational system.  He loved school. The fate of his life depended on two teachers.  About one of them he writes, “With M. Bernard class was always interesting for the simple reason he loved his work with a passion.”   His method consisted of strict control on behavior while at the same time knowing the right moment to bring from his treasure chest the mineral collection, the herbarium, the mounted butterflies and insects, the maps: “In arithmetic he instituted a contest in mental calculation that forced students to think quickly.”

What Camus so passionately loved in school was that he was not at home, “where want and ignorance made life harder and more bleak” (143-4).  So this book is more than a story of one boy living with a brutish grandparent, a nearly deaf mother, a nearly speechless uncle.  It is the story of every sensitive person who is aware of the brutishness of life and must live with it.  It is the story of every person who loves someone, and lives with a person who cannot hear us, cannot listen to more than the basics.  And it is the story of every person who is curious and wants to know and lives in a world with people who will not or cannot communicate what is most important.   And this story is therefore art for it is about a common human condition!  It’s the situation of a kid in rural Oregon who yearns for excitement and is thrilled for a ride into Portland.

And the human condition is not hopeless.  As individuals the situation is very hopeful; we grow in power as we age.  And we can make life more hopeful for the human race by creating opportunities for escape from brutal and ignorant lives.  Unitarian reformers have historically done this.  Horace Mann was the founder of public education in America; Elizabeth Peabody popularized the idea of kindergarten in America.  We started several colleges, among them Reed College.  And we have been on the side of reform in children’s issues.

Camus’ religious development was unusual.  Of his grandmother he wrote, “She never spoke of God.  In fact that was not a word he ever heard spoken throughout his childhood, nor did he trouble himself about it.  Life, so vivid and mysterious, was enough to occupy his entire being” (165).  Nonetheless, he takes a one month rush course to prepare for his first communion, and what he gets from this exposure to the church is to hear organ music.  “[T]he thunder of the music that exploded filled him... with an extraordinary exaltation that stayed with him… taking him away from everything that was happening” (172).  This music is made by human beings, and that exaltation is pride in the glory of the human race for having produced Johann Sebastian Bach!  What this existentialist describes is religious humanism!

The faith of a religious humanist is found in education, first as a person’s best chance at human liberation, and second as society’s best chance for progressive changes.  Third, education passes on history in the form of recipes, building plans, maps, and patterns for weaving patterns, as well as techniques for music and art and, in addition to the history, it stimulates the mind for the creation of new things to bring joy and beauty and order and goodness to our lives.  We devise laws and rules and methods of agriculture.  History tells us how far we have come in a very short time; in geologic time the human race is very young.  The human venture becomes a thing of dignity we can celebrate with applause.

Camus’ journey through memory reveals how another teacher’s work helped him get a scholarship to the high school, which started his academic career at a time when most did not go beyond elementary school.  The teacher was an army veteran who showed students who had been orphaned by the war, as Camus was, extra care.  Every day after lunch the teacher read aloud to the class a passage from a war novel and, at the end, when the hero of the book dies, the young student Camus wept openly in the classroom before the other boys.  After the teacher finished the book he gave it to Camus, saying simply, “You earned it.”

Decades later he and Camus still remained friends.  “This man had launched him in the world, taking the responsibility for uprooting him so that he could go on to still greater discoveries.”  This teacher had to go to the student’s home to get permission, for the family’s poverty meant they needed the money the boy could earn by leaving school and going to work.  The teacher charmed the grandmother.  He sent the boy away by jokingly saying, “You go out on the street and see if I’m there.  You understand [he said to the grandmother] I’m going to speak well of him, and he’s liable to think it’s the truth.”

And so the boy who was beaten for playing grows taller and one day takes the whip away from his grandmother.  He graduates from high school and goes to the university on scholarship and becomes a writer, and one day wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

When Camus was 40 years old he wanted to know something more about his father, but there was so little to be known.   He was aging and in the year 1958, writing phrases that sound as if they came from the literature of the contemporary men’s movement, he wrote, “And now that everything is leaving me I realize I need someone to show me the way and to... praise me.... I need my father.”   Camus finds his father’s grave and for the first time feels the tragedy of a man dying at the age of 29: “[T]he overwhelming compassion that a grown man feels for a murdered child” (26).

He visits an old friend in the town, who blithely advises him to avoid such feelings by saying, “Tell yourself he never grew old.  He was spared that suffering.”  To which Camus wryly replies, “Along with a certain number of pleasures.”

The friend’s response is, “Yes, you love life.  You have to, since that is all you believe in.”  His friend is older and wrestles with feeling empty: “I have accomplished nothing. There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.”

Affirming life with a sober joy, Camus replies, “You’re right. I love life.  I’m hungry for it. At the same time, life sometimes seems horrible to me….  I am a believer out of skepticism.  Yes, I want to believe, I want to live, forever.”  Camus is a man of faith and says, “There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live, just by their presence” (35).  As Schweitzer wrote in the opening words this morning, when our own light goes out it may be relit by the light from another person.”  We can be sustained by the possibilities for love and for justice when we see what others have done.

His writing appeals to me because he thinks we bring meaning to our lives instead of believing life has an absolute meaning; one single meaning given by family or the state or religious dogma.  He loves people in every way—wistfully and happily and proudly—and articulates a lasting humanism.  Another writer articulates the process by which this happens in Camus’ life and how it might happen in ours.

Florida Scott-Maxwell writes, “You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.  When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.”

There is still a need for personal liberation in America, and to liberate ourselves to feel the passion for life again.  We need such art to wake us up to the poetry and passion of life!  How I wish to give you the passion of this religious atheist!  You could help children’s lives change by teaching church school, or tutoring in the public school system, or becoming a court appointed representative for a child.

Letting passion bring you to life is always a risk.  We can tell who’s in love.  The passion puts color in your cheeks, dampness on your brow, a louder beat in the heart, because you are suddenly a piece of the process by which the love for other human beings becoming persons becomes infectious.

Albert Camus: His writing presents a reality that says whether there be God or not there is a reality of the human spirit, and elements of spirituality are accessible to everyone.  We have the moral imagination to feel the plight of the poor, the illiterate, and the refugees.  And a conscience that holds us accountable.

PRAYER

God, unite us in a vision to work to rescue children whose lives are disadvantaged.  Amen.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Robert Schaibly. All rights reserved.