Responsibility

Who is responsible for the devastation of New Orleans? Was it a preventable disaster, or an inevitable occurrence? What roles do global warming, public or governmental neglect, or sheer circumstance (or all of the above) play in the continuing human drama that has unraveled a major American city? Already, the story is beginning to fade from much of the media, and with it, public memory of events will recede. How each of us responds is pretty much left to private decision.

When Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the entire Bay of Naples was affected. Although many of us have heard of Herculaneum and Pompeii, there were, in fact hundreds of Roman towns, cities and bay side villas annihilated by the blast. Roman authorities were so overwhelmed by the disaster that they just left whole regions for future generations to excavate in archeological digs. Pliny the Elder, the admiral of the Roman navy died 10 miles from the mountain when a huge blast scoured the countryside with poison gases, CO2 and sulfuric acid clouds. He was investigating the eruption and trying to save survivors: no volcano had ever erupted in Roman historical memory, and there was no word for volcano in Latin. Pliny was going by historical accounts he had read from the ancient world, preserved by Greeks, Egyptians and folks from Mesopotamia: he had guessed that Vesuvius was a “fire mountain,” (the Greek term), and he was unafraid for he did not believe in the “gods” and considered what he saw as a simple act of nature. For him, the responsible thing was remaining open to what the world presented, to be unafraid and to try to help who he could. He died, living that charge.

After having seen the movie, “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” I looked up the “Klingenberg Case,” as it’s called in Germany and reviewed the story of Anneliese Michel, the young pious Catholic girl upon whose suffering and death the movie is based. Contrary to what the movie indicates, her seizures and psychotic episodes had commenced in high school, and no supernatural events followed the defense attorneys around when the case against the exorcising priests (yes, there was more than one) went to trial (oh yes, the case occurred in Germany). The lenient sentences handed down were due to the generous nature of the German court system when dealing with obviously sincere or misguided parents, not because the jury was actually sympathetic to the explanation proffered by the officiating priests. These facts are important because the Vatican actually changed its own rules on exorcism after the death of Anneliese. Who’s served by changing the story, and ramping up the supernatural element for American audiences? In the movie, the priest simply wanted her story to be told—so where was Anneliese—where was the thematic responsibility to her?

It’s hard to know who to be responsible for, to…and I actually believe that most people want to believe that they are responsible beings: beings capable of responding to what is being asked of them at any given minute. Question is, who’s watching, who’s keeping track? What can we get away with, and when? Don’t tell me you haven’t asked yourself that question….haven’t caught yourself in it at least once?

Conventional religion teaches that God/Allah is “watching us,” his/her/its eye is always on us somehow/where. I remember that, as a child, I experienced God the Father as a big peeping tom, spying on everyone, never giving anyone any privacy, not even in our most inner thoughts. Later on, I figured that, since God is seeing everything anyway, and never did anything to prevent me, I might as well do any thing I wanted to.

I recognize now that both responses came from my sense that God was “out there” somewhere, separate from me, separate from the world. Anneliese came to believe that she could be possessed because of the conviction that the world “out there” was separate, humans can be possessed and exorcised. The medical world didn’t help: for them, the neurological disorder that took her was also “foreign” in its way and they sought to radically exorcise it in a different manner. Both points of view saw “nature,” as potentially lethal and quite terrifying, both sought to control its effects.

I remain fascinated by Pliny the Elder, not a mystic, not even a religious man, probably even arrogant in his approach to a natural phenomenon that he didn’t understand, but certainly curious, open, wondering. He died appreciating the mystery that killed him.

For Sufis, the divine is an ever living presence that suffuses every facet and experience of life: ya Raqib, we say, oh divine watcher, who not only sees all, but encompasses every life and experience, every pain and pleasure and who holds us to account simply because we are not apart from that which happens to us. In some fashion, we experience what we are, and if our experience is painful, it’s not because we are bad, it’s simply because that’s what happens to some of us. The rest of us, who are unscathed in a particular moment, are there to help, to witness, to learn…because some day, “that” may happen to another one of us.

So who is responsible for the disaster of New Orleans? No one of us personally, all of us generally….and more importantly, we are accountable to how we respond now, from day to day, as the story itself becomes less newsworthy, more mundane. Face it, an entire city is teetering on the brink, an entire infrastructure, and we really don’t know exactly what to do. It’s a perfect place to begin. We’re all going to die some time, appreciate the mystery and the challenge now.