Openings: Acknowledging Essential Moments in Human Communication

3. The Call to Openness

41 —3— The Call to Openness At the age of fifty-eight, my father suffered complete kidney failure. For the rest of his life (four years), he would have to live with the help of a dialysis machine. His life was sustained, but its quality was tragic: he lost his job, he lost his capacity to function sexually, he questioned his religious faith, he developed severe neurotic symptoms, and he was admitted to a psychiatric institute. The first time I visited him there in his mirrorless room with barred windows, he immediately began to cry as he “welcomed ” me: “Look what they have done to your daddy!” Staring at his blood moving through a machine in a hospital, he felt more artificial than ever before in his life. Alone in his house, he wrote in a diary that he kept to document personal responses to his deteriorating condition. “I can’t die because I must stay to keep up with the ‘Jones.’ I can’t die because I have traditions to carry on. I can’t die because I am afraid to.” In the next entry he wrote, “Everyone calls, the phone rings and rings with questions and professional advice. But it’s too, too bad that they can’t help— they don’t know my pain—nor do I.” Owing to complications associated with his disease, my father suffered cardiac arrest. His surgeons tried to insert a pacemaker. It didn’t work. 42 • Openings My mother and I (but especially my mother, who was home and in the hospital with him most every day) were caught up in my father’s crisis to the very end—and beyond. We were tortured by a much loved one’s undying misery as his life came to a close. We have been haunted by a presence of sheer placelessness since he passed on. There is a void in our lives that we fill with warm memories and hopes of perhaps his now being in a better place, experiencing forever “a grand opening.” But the void remains, despite such religious remedy. We still suffer. The severity of suffering can, at times, be overwhelming. In such an existential state, writes the philosopher and Talmudic scholar Emmanuel Levinas, there is an absence of all refuge. It is the fact of being directly exposed to being. It is made up of the impossibility of fleeing or retreating. The whole acuity of suffering lies in the impossibility of retreat. It is the fact of being backed up against life and being.1 My father’s illness and death placed him and his loved ones in a stark reality, backed up against life and being, vividly exposed to the objective uncertainty and finitude of human existence. We know that our lives will end, but we do not know exactly when or how. Illness is one of life’s interruptions that give us pause for thought as they shake the foundations of our everyday worlds of know-how. Despite perhaps its ill effects, the interruption is a privileged moment for coming to realistic terms about the meaning of life. Such an interruption and the pause it initiates work together as a call of conscience. “Without the existence of conscience,” the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm once wrote, “the human race would have bogged down long ago in its hazardous course.”2 Indeed, people whose lives are uninformed by conscience are otherwise known as psychopaths. Such people cannot be trusted, for they lie without compunction, injure without remorse, and cheat with little fear of detection. In a world where distrust is the norm, civility becomes impossible. All that we could reasonably expect from the conscienceless inhabitants of such a world would be self-serving, uncaring, and manipulative behavior. Forget about such concepts as guilt and shame, compassion and fairness, duty and justice. Respecting others would be a waste of time. Giving one’s word would be, at most, a joke. Using language to discuss matters in a The Call to Openness • 43 sincere, appropriate, and truthful manner would be a meaningless endeavor. When conscience leaves the scene and fails to return, the fate of a body politic’s moral ecology is sealed. Perhaps, then, Fromm’s observation should be amended: without the existence of conscience, there never would have been a “human race” in the first place—at least none worthy of the name. We typically conceive of conscience as...