September 9, 2016 - 01:51
The embodiment of guilt in “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is very interesting to me because I have always had trouble with feeling overly guilty for small actions that in my mind my parents would disapprove of. So what If the world operated without guilt? Would I have the majority of the problems I have today? Ursula Le Guin has decided that guilt is what keeps the world from being a blissful place and in my personal account with the priest guilt was the guiding force.
It’s been two weeks since I met with the priest. However the memory of discomfort and shyness still linger whenever I think back to my encounter. In Ursula Le Guin’s short story the titular characters, aka the ones who walk away, choose to turn their back on everything they know and when I sat in front of this man who, much like the genderless child represented guilt, represented a whole part of my identity that I felt like I was beginning to turn my back on. It didn’t help that he was so kind and understanding of where I was coming from. Catholicism was supposed to be easy to walk away from. I wasn’t supposed to break down after not going to mass for the first time but instead hold my head high for doing something I had promised myself I would do. However when we spoke the priest confirmed my opinions. He validated my emotions towards the church and even gave me a chance to meet people who have been where I am but I didn’t want that. I saw the child and decided I wouldn’t help it.
The priest’s empathy is what caught me off guard. I didn’t expect him to care as much as he did. It was dinner time and I was being selfish and keeping him and others from eating but he would’ve stayed in that room as long as I needed him. It’s not that I haven’t met other people who have had empathy for my situation just the Catholics I’ve run across in my lifetime, which is quite a lot, usually have more of a strictly cannon law viewpoint towards homosexuals. Meaning they say they aren’t judging you but say that you’ve chosen this lifestyle and that they’ll pray for you at the same time. The priest did ask if he could pray for my family or more specifically my uncle who died recently, but not for me or my soul that according to the laws of the Catholic Church will probably be burning in an eternal pit of fire and brimstone since I missed mass last Sunday. So there is that guilt I’m trying to learn to turn my back on.
Something I am interested in knowing is what happens when people walk away from Omelas. Do they forget their family and homes? Do the rituals and even the child fade from their memories? Because if not they could find their way back and attempt to make changes or change themselves in a way that they could handle the knowledge of the child and still be able to stay with their people. In the same way I wonder if I fully walk away from this religion do I in turn lose my family? My dad is a deacon and my mom grows in her faith every day. My grandma credits god for her still being alive saying that without the help of god she would’ve died when she found out my uncle was dead. Despite their deep affection for this deity that I now feel indifference towards I still want my family to be there. I don’t want them to fade into the background of my life. I didn’t ask the priest if he had any advice for me on how to go about telling my family. I only asked that he not mention any of this to my father. He said that this was my own private matter.
Matter, something that takes up space and has volume. My matter, my child sitting in its pile of feces that I could also just walk away from and allow it to fade into the distant corners of my psyche. Where it can take up space. I feel like this issue takes up so much space since I kept it in for so long that it took on fluid properties and filled my mind to max capacity with guilty thoughts and dreams of freedom. The priest didn’t really help relieve the pressure but instead gave me the opportunity to tell my family on my own terms instead of intruding. In Omelas the children are taught of the child in the cellar when they are aware meaning they are somewhere between eight and twelve years old. In some Christian churches children aren’t baptized until this age. That way the child knows what they’re getting into and can look this religion up and down and decide if it’s for them. In the Catholic Church you’re baptized traditionally as an infant, and someone else decides that for the next 17 or so years you will learn what it is to be Catholic and then you get a chance to say whether it is really for you or not. It is almost unheard of for a teenager to not accept their confirmation and at this point I was just going through the motions of Catholicism. Like how Omelanians just accept the fact that there is nothing they can do but leave the child in the cellar in order to maintain peace, I knew I had no choice but to be confirmed in order to maintain peace at home. And as I remarked in my previous paper I regret my confirmation, but now I have the freewill to express these feeling to my parents and relieve myself of some of the guilt. This would be the equivalent of someone picking up the child in the cellar and taking care of it. I’ve acknowledged the guilt but now I have to deal with the consequences, my era of peace with my family would be over. However, walking away isn’t an option anymore for me. The priest showed me that it is possible for someone closely connected to the church to show empathy towards a marginalized person. So maybe there’s hope after all. Not in Omelas though. There you either stay in an almost utopian wonderland filled with orgies and flutes or you leave to some unknown place. Maybe that’s our world, since they, like us, cannot conceptualize a world they’ve never encountered. A world with guilt.