What Responsibility Is All About
A little note: The series of articles grouped under the label ‘Beyond Resistance’ was first published on Better, from August 2020 onwards. Because of that context, they are written in a more general tone and outlook, rather than a pointedly Christian one – although the roots of my thinking are, as always, in the Bible. I have edited them slightly for this website.
I remember that, as a Rebel child, few ideas struck as much dread into my heart as the idea of Responsibility. I hated so much the fact that I was seemingly unable to control my impulse to lash out – which I know now was my reaction to feeling under too much pressure from expectations – that I remember fervently wishing I was insane, so I could not be held responsible for my actions, and just be left in peace in my own corner to do what I wanted (i.e., for the most part, read).
A child wishing they were insane, just to be free from responsibility. It sounds heartbreaking to me now (like most things related to my childhood), but it does show how in a Rebel’s mind, expectations and responsibility can be so tightly entangled and wound up together, that, because their strong instinct is to resist expectations, they can easily end up rejecting responsibility.
Only, responsibility has this awful (awe-full) quality of complete and utter ineluctability.
If you’re thinking, ‘Oh my, like destiny or something?’ you’d be right – that’s usually the context for that word. Just that, on an individual level, I do not believe destiny is ineluctable – only responsibility is. And why would responsibility be inescapable, when destiny isn’t?
Because it’s tied together, inextricably, not with expectations as I mistakenly used to think (they are in truth neither here nor there), but with an inherent human quality: Freedom.
(Right, right, I’ll leave off the big Latin words! 😛 Erm, no, scratch that. I love them too much. Sorry! 😊)
When I was 10, my worldview changed completely: from atheism to Christianity. I lived the first 12 years of my life under a totalitarian regime. Even though, as a child, I was only partially aware of the terrible extent to which Ceaușescu’s state obliterated its citizens’ freedom, I got to learn about that even more later. After it was all over, and even more of its horrors were uncovered before the stunned eyes of the world – including most Romanians themselves, I got to hear about people who had been put in prison not for any wrong deeds, but for their convictions, which they would not keep silent about. Their basic human freedom to communicate with others about their beliefs was taken away from them. I got to read about people such as Richard Wurmbrand, a Jewish Lutheran pastor, who spent fourteen years in communist prisons, and three of those in solitary confinement, with no light or sound.
Surely when so much freedom is taken away, such a man is also freed from any responsibility?
Wurmbrand, a Christian, was aware though that there was an immeasurably higher authority than the Communists out there. And it was this Authority that had given him freedoms no earthly rulers can ever take away. And he was still responsible for how he used those freedoms. What he did in solitary confinement was to compose sermons in his mind, no matter that the freedom to preach them to his parishioners had been taken away from him. He later wrote out 350 of them, besides so many other books in English and Romanian. The rebel voice that the communists tried to smother long ago can still be heard loud and clear to this day.
Recently, I had a lightbulb moment while meditating on responsibility and freedom. It was in the context of expectations and power or lack of power. What can you be legitimately expected to be responsible for, when your ability to do certain things is greatly reduced? I was trying to help somebody who is feeling stuck, because she feels she is lacking the ability to perform even basic self-care tasks, and therefore has given up even attempting them.
Certainly, we can only be held responsible for what we can actually do, rather than what we clearly cannot. When someone loses their ability to do various things (and therefore their freedom to do them), is there anything they are still responsible for? What are the things we will always be responsible for, because they are always under our own control?
Two things presented themselves – two things that are and will be in our own power and nobody else’s, until our last moment of lucidity: our attention and our attitude. Even though I might lose all my ability to move, and all my freedom to act – to the point of solitary confinement, these two things can be controlled by no-one else but me: where I choose to direct my attention, and what attitude I choose to adopt.
These two in-built freedoms will always be there, and thus we’ll always be responsible about how we choose to use them. The way we choose to employ them can lead to more and more freedom. Responsibility is not to be feared, but cherished – if we are legitimately held responsible for many things, it is because we have the freedom to do them! How amazingly wonderful is that?
To all my dear fellow Rebels – and Obligers, Questioners, Upholders – we might not all of us have been born with a silver spoon in our mouths, but we were all born possessing this precious golden coin: one side of it is Freedom, the other is Responsibility. They are one and the same, and the whole of it is called Love. What are we going to do with it?
