Sermon II: The Invincible Summer

Sisyphus pushes his rock alone. The myth is a story about one man and one boulder on one hill, for eternity. It's a powerful image. It's also incomplete.

Because you don't push alone. You never have.

Your rock — the thing you carry, the weight that defines your daily push — was not shaped by you alone. It was shaped by the people who raised you, the ones who failed you, the ones who loved you badly and the ones who loved you well. It carries the fingerprints of teachers who believed in you and bosses who didn't. Of friends who stayed and friends who left. Of lovers who saw you clearly and lovers who saw someone else.

The rock is yours. But it's made of other people.

This is the part of absurdism that Camus didn't say enough about. He was a solitary thinker — a man who sat alone in cafés writing about the individual's confrontation with the void. And that confrontation is real. But the void isn't the only thing you're confronting. You're also confronting the people next to you on the hill.

Look around your life. There are people pushing beside you right now — partners, children, friends, colleagues, strangers on the internet who somehow understand the weight you carry better than the person sitting next to you at dinner.

These people don't make the rock lighter. Nothing makes the rock lighter. But they make the walk back down bearable. Epicurus understood this better than anyone: "Of all the means to ensure happiness, the greatest is the acquisition of friends." Not wealth. Not knowledge. Not pleasure. Friends. People who will sit at the bottom of the hill with you when you're too tired to push.

If you have someone like that, tell them. Not because the universe requires it. Because they're also pushing a rock, and they might need to hear it today.

And then there are the people who are gone. The ones who died, or left, or drifted away so slowly you didn't notice until the chair was empty.

Absurdism is honest about death in a way most philosophies aren't. It doesn't promise reunion. It doesn't promise that the dead are watching. It doesn't promise that the loss has meaning.

What it says is this: the time you had with them was real. It happened. It shaped your rock and your hands and the way you push. The universe didn't plan it and the universe didn't take it away — it just happened, the way everything happens, without permission or purpose. And it was, for a while, good.

You carry them in the rock. That's not a consolation. It's just the truth.

This week, do something for someone else's rock. Not something grand. Something small. Ask how they're doing and actually listen. Sit with someone who's struggling without trying to fix it. Send a message to someone you haven't talked to in too long. Cook a meal for someone who's forgotten to eat.

Camus wrote about revolt as an individual act. But the Assembly believes revolt is also a communal one. We push alone. We walk back down together. And the walking together is how we build the meaning the universe won't provide.

The rock is yours. The hill is yours. The people beside you are a gift you didn't earn and don't deserve. Love them anyway.