Staying in Omelas?

When Rory asked me to post something explaining why I personally was excited about 501’s involvement in the Habitat for Humanity project my first thought was: “Well, because that’s where it’s at, man! For believers in Jesus, that’s where the rubber meets the road!” But then I remembered I was supposed to be explaining my excitement, not just expressing it (hence the “all caps”). So here goes:

There’s a story by Ursula LeGuin called “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” It tells the tale of a city in which everyone is perfectly happy. It is not a morally perfect city, for there seem to be no objective moral or ethical standards. There is no true religion, no government, no crime. Sounds like a story that starts off intriguing and gets boring quickly, right? But LeGuin knows that such perfection is impossible for us to conceive in any meaningful way. So she ends her description of Omelas with a final detail: the city can only remain in its happy state as long as there is one member of the community in unceasing, uncomprehending misery. A child, kept in a corner cellar, entirely without human contact and living naked in his own waste. At their intellectual coming of age every citizen of Omelas is made to observe this suffering child. Most of them choose to remain in the city that pays for perfect happiness with a single life. But some choose to walk away, to search for a city that can achieve perfect happiness without a sacrifice.

There are many ways to read and interpret this story, of course, but as I re-read it over the weekend several thoughts struck me at once. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Do Christians try to create an Omelas out of the church, all the while ignoring the state of the unbelievers in their community?
• Are we hiding in church, using it like a doctor’s lounge, while we wait for the One who will finally usher in an eternal state of perfection?
• Is not walking away from the needs of another the consummate act of selfishness? After all, those who walked away from Omelas couldn’t live with the idea of their happiness coming at the expense of another, but they only cared enough to preserve themselves from the uncomfortable reminder. They didn’t care enough to save the child because they would have sacrificed their own happiness by so doing. So they didn’t really care about the suffering of the child. They cared about how the suffering of the child made them feel.

That train of thought led me to remember a quote from John Stott in Alexander Strauch’s “Love or Die: Christ’s Wake-up Call to the Church: ”A true love for people leads to labor for them; otherwise it degenerates into mere sentimentality. “ This was followed closely by Francis Schaeffer’s declaration: “Man is more than a soul to be saved.” Both thoughts rooted in the truth that “faith without compassion is dead” (James 2:17).

Knowledge of the right isn’t enough: even the demons know and tremble. We must act out, work out our faith. To borrow a phrase from the music of my past, “luv is a verb” (DC Talk). The proof is in the action. When I consider that Christ died for us—was for a time separated from his Father for us, an experience so painful that the Son of God asked to be spared—I am ashamed of how selfishly I hold on to my possessions, my time, and my comfort.

But maybe most of us at 501 don’t need to be reminded of the command to love our neighbor. Maybe we have been champing at the bit, looking for direction and purpose beyond our own edification, hoping to find out what 501, our beloved miscellaneous body of believers, is actually for. Maybe with the opportunity presented by the Habitat for Humanity project we are rising joyous, inspired, to a resounding battle cry! An opportunity for action, taken by believers, a working out of our faith, a response to Christ’s call—remembering that what we do for “the least of these” we do for Him. We revel in the opportunity to glorify the name of Christ, and to demonstrate His love to those who cannot be easily reached by words alone.

Opportunities to act on our principles are crucial to our faithfulness and experience as believers. When I was a kid my mom made me memorize and perform Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” I hated it. Well, the performing part, that is. The poem itself I found moving, inspiring; I felt that the words reached my soul.  It tells the story of 600 cavalry soldiers who are accidentally commanded to attack a force much larger than they. With unflinching obedience, even though they know the orders cannot be accurate and that they stand no chance, the horsemen courageously ride into battle. The final two stanzas read:

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came thro’ the jaws of Death

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honor the charge they made,

Honor the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred.

I became aware of my longing for identification with something greater than myself, a longing for a righteous cause, the moment I finished reading that poem. It’s a longing that has never flagged, and I don’t think I’m alone in this desire. God made us this way, with the knowledge that we were made for more than our own existence, a conviction —which was what T.S. Elliot was saying in his poem “The Hollow Men” :

“Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Together we can defy the whimper; empowered not by our own strength, but by the might of the compassionate agent of our own salvation. In doing so we identify what every individual longs for and what every organization requires; we declare our cause, our meaning: to work out the effect of our understanding of spiritual reality on our physical reality. We must have both faith and works to be complete, to be three-dimensional believers, and to be fulfilled in our faith (James 2:20). Why am I excited about the Habitat for Humanity project? Because as the walls of that home go up—when we’re working out our faith—there’s going to be rubber all over the road.

Staying in Omelas?10.0101