Responsibility

SAT., APR. 22, 1989, 7:10 AM
UNION CLUB, BOSTON

Hear, o son, some words about this human need, of which you spoke yesterday. The need for responsibility accompanies any human action, but has particular significance in relation to drinking alcoholic drinks and beverages. It’s interesting, isn’t it?, that this was the theme of your luncheon conversation and then your behavior last night. You were drunk, but you knew it. You walked miles without incident, and you got to your sleeping place without harm to self or others. This is fundamental responsibility. Did I carry you along? Well, you know I am with you in every circumstance, so, of course I was there. Did I help? Just assume I did.

You have spoken of responsibility as a spiritual quality, and I agree that it is such. It is quite difficult to specify exactly what is responsible behavior and what is not. Oh, it is rather easy to give examples of powerful responsibility and of gross irresponsibility, but to delineate clearly the distinction in the middle is quite difficult. Circumstances often determine or… the action is “some of each.”

Responsible to whom? The most obvious response is to others who depend upon you. If you had had some task to perform last evening that would affect some others and you weren’t able to do it that would have made your drunkenness irresponsible. When a person steals or robs someone to get money for drugs that use becomes irresponsible. When law enforcement officers arrest a person for drug use when that person is innocent this is irresponsible, even as the job is a part of society’s responsibility.

The healthy, integrated person with some development of spirit also must be responsible to self. You accept the fact that occasionally you will drink too much. Thus, when you do you are not breaking some vital vow and being irresponsible to self. If you were one who decries all drunkenness then any excess would be irresponsible. Some young people (and some older, as well) have no standards that apply to drug taking behavior. Hence they are not being irresponsible to self when they get high or strung out… and yet there is irresponsibility in doing anything that harms the self, if it is not of benefit to others. Sacrifice is responsible, even if it brings harm to self.

Then there is responsibility to Me, the Creator and Sustainer, the Triune God. People feel this responsibility in a wide variety of ways. Some, of course, do not feel it at all, but there are many more who have kind of nagging feeling about certain acts and behaviors, often with no clear teaching or experience that is responsible for such a feeling. Then all who have been raised as Christians have some responsibility to Me, even as it comes forth as guilt about actions past. And there are those servants who feel quite responsible to Me in relation to most of their daily actions. Some are comfortable with such responsibility, while others feel more or less “bound” by My restrictions on conduct. I prefer to have people happy in their responsibility to Me, but I have to take responsibility “any way I can get it.”

There is no agreed-upon way to measure or quantify responsibility. Those who like quantification have a right to criticize declarations that responsibility be a societal standard. “If you can’t measure it and tell exactly whether or not it is being displayed, then don’t set it as a standard.” But what shall be in its place? Even laws must be interpreted and are always subject to re-interpretation. The law of your land now says that it is legal to abort an early pregnancy. Thus, a physician who does this and the woman whose pregnancy is aborted are both responsible. If the law is changed then the same act becomes an irresponsible one, for breaking a law is accepted as being irresponsible. But what about responsibility to one’s present children, to society as a whole, and to self in relation to parenthood? When responsibilities conflict decisions are difficult.