9/4/22 “The Story of Omelas” by Nancy E. Petty
Luke 14:25-33
I begin today with an excerpted reading of a short story by Ursula LeGuin, The Story of Omelas:
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The ringing of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own.
Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding throughout the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells. Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?
They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us…
How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched…Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time… I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh…One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt…
Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign gray beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair…The Festival of Summer has begun. Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer.
The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually. They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.
This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed. The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.
Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no real doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment… Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.
Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible. At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
The Story of Omelas is not that different from the parables in Luke 14 that invites us to reflect on the cost of following the way of love and justice—the way of Jesus. For every decision we make, there is a cost and the gospel questions before us are: “What price are we willing to pay?” and “What is the cost of our decisions to others?” Sometimes the cost to our decisions is minimal and other times the cost is great and painful. At the heart of Jesus’ teaching in Luke 14, and in the story of Omelas, is that to follow Jesus, and to care for our fellow beings, we often have to walk away from our personal comfort and joy. There is a cost to following the way of love and justice.
The week before my 29th birthday, I called my sister to tell her I was coming home to come out to our parents as a lesbian. I will never forget her first response. She asked me: What if they tell you you are not welcome back home and that they don’t ever want to see you again? In all honesty, I had not counted that cost. But it was a sobering question. That week, I could think about nothing but her question. Could I handle the cost of never going back home or seeing my parents again? Unlike so many of my LBBTQIA+ siblings, I didn’t have to pay that price. And yet, Jesus says to follow his way we have to be ready to face the cost of losing things that are important to us. Because of my sister’s question, I had wrestled with, and was ready to risk the cost of coming out. It was terrifying and sad, and yet, I knew that in order to be who God had made me to be, I had to risk paying that cost. For me, not taking that risk meant that everything else would be a lie.
The Hebrew scripture for the lectionary readings this week comes from Deuteronomy 30: “I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of God that I am commanding you today, by loving God, walking in God’s ways, and observing God’s commandments…you shall live…I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and all of humanity may live…”
To walk out of Omelas, to reject an easy comfort that rests on the misery of someone else, to choose life and blessing for all, we have to be willing to count the cost of the decisions we make. We have to be willing to set aside our personal comfort and joy for a justice-love for those who are imprisoned by our personal joy and comfort and happiness. It doesn’t mean we will never experience comfort or know joy or feel happiness. But what it does mean is that the cost of following the way of justice-love is costly. Bonhoeffer says it this way: [life and blessing] is not a cheap grace; it is a costly grace. “Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man [or woman] his/her life, and it is grace because it gives a man [or woman] the only true life.”
I will end with a hopeful and encouraging word. There is a generation of adults, we call them Generation Z, and they are teaching us something about walking out of Omelas—something that Jesus was trying to teach us. They are teaching us what it means to walk away from comforts and entitlements, to reject the should and the oughts and the respectability of the American dream; they are teaching us to walk into the darkness of a new way. They are the generation that is insisting on meaningful work and giving back to the community. They are willing to pay the cost of not having the house with the picket fence, the 2.5 kids, the secure job, and the promise of a padded 401k.
You see, Generation Z had decided that the cost of the middle class American life is just too high. There seems to be something about the precariousness of our times that has freed that generation from the mindset that we should mortgage our lives by giving away our time in exchange for money and things. I’m not saying they’ve got it all figured out, because an aging parent in the basement in chains is not better than an imprisoned child, but I do see promise and hope—both for America and the church. Because before we can find the way, we have to be willing to reckon with the cost of the choices we already make, and then we have to be willing to walk away from comfort and to risk our personal “happiness” in order to live in right relationship with the sky and the earth, the rich and the poor, the black and the white, the haves and the have nots.
I am not asking you today to give all your possessions. Maybe I should be. But I am asking you what your possessions are costing you, and what they cost the planet, and most importantly, who is paying those costs, because someone always pays—the day laborers and union workers. I am asking you to consider what might be standing between you and the way of Christ. And I am asking you to take a risk, however small or large that may be, to bear the cost of being a follower of Jesus.
