The Myth of Removal
Short Essay on The Plague by Albert Camus
Rambert: All I wanted to know was whether you couldn't possibly give me a certificate stating that I haven't got this damned disease.
Rieux: But you must see your argument doesn't hold water. . . I don't know whether you have the disease or not. . . Oh, I know it's an absurd situation, but we're all involved in it.
Rembert: But I don't belong here.
In the cherished children’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit, love from a child is what makes a stuffed animal become real. While the tale is fantastical, it touches on the actuality that love is the fundamental source of all reality. Everything that we are is grounded in love. And the essence of love is that it, “cannot exist in isolation but presupposes the other.”1 Meaning that, on a human level, we can only be an authentic person in relation to the other. Isolated on our own, we are a “bare unit” which is why, “egocentricity is the death of true personhood. Each becomes a real person only through entering into relation with other persons.”2 Rambert’s disposition, “I haven’t got this damned disease,” shows the presence of a more severe condition.
Perhaps one of the greatest infections plaguing the human imagination is the belief that one can somehow be unaffected, isolated from whatever plagues us all. The human condition is ‘what it is’ precisely because it bears no exceptionalism. As much as we may naively cling to a form of dualism that would constantly seduce us to believe that ‘we’ are removed from ‘they,’ that there is an ‘us’ and ‘them,’ in truth there is only us. Why are we commanded to love God and neighbor? Because to do anything less would be to painfully run against the grain of reality. I love God by loving my neighbor and if I refuse the later, I do not know nor love God.3 I must love God in my neighbor. This is both the gift and terrifying response-ability of freedom.4 And, if I ever try to negate my responsibility to my neighbor, by feigning remoteness like Rembert, “But I don’t belong here,” I deny not only my neighbor’s existence but my own. There is no distance that can separate us from God because there is no distance that can separate us from neighbor. We can no more escape our neighbor than we can our own being because plurality is what makes us real. Humanity, like God, is not a unit but a unity.5 This is why the neighbor is nonspatial;6 our shared humanness keeps us in unceasing adjacency, in which we always belong.
† Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (St Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1995) p. 28
Ibid. God, reality itself, is love because of this.
1 Jn 4:7-8
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays - p. 24 “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
I am dancing with Ware here.
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Beacon Press), Kindle Edition, p. 79