love

July 1, 2018

On Suffering: Christianity and Transcendentalism

The suffering of the children and parents on our border brings up again the age-old question: why does there have to be so much suffering in the world? The short answer is, of course, there doesn’t have to be “so much”–our government is shamefully inflicting needless suffering on these poor families.  But what about suffering more generally?  If there is a loving God, as so many Americans believe, why all this pain and anguish in the world?

The question of suffering resonated powerfully with me this week owing to two separate occurrences.  One was a fantastic piece of theatre, an imagined modern conversation between Emerson and his muse, Margaret Fuller, played out at a picnic in a park in Peterborough, NH by two brilliant actors.   They joke, they eat, they ask about each other’s work, and then they begin to argue about the nature of Beauty. Emerson claims it can be found in all things,   Fuller disagrees, forcefully, and gives him the example of a girl waiting to be picked up by her parent after a long stay at summer camp, sitting on her suitcase, watching all the other children disappearing one by one with their mothers and fathers…But her mother will never come. She has been killed in an accident en route to bringing back her child.   Fuller cannot see any beauty in that scene—it haunts her:  the child growing more and more fearful, more desperate sensing something is wrong…she can’t stop thinking about it.

And yet, Emerson tells her, you are carrying that child with you now, and will be forever. You have wrapped her in your thoughts, your loving thoughts, and won’t let her go—that is a beautiful thing.  To care about someone, to have your heart go out to someone in trouble, someone who is suffering…there is Beauty in that.

At the same time, I’m reading George Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, and the good-hearted young protagonist, Dinah, who is devoting her life to helping those in need in a poor mining village, writes  a letter to a friend, describing what happens to her just after dusk each night:

“I sit in my chair in the dark room and close my eyes…and then, the very hardship, and the sorrow, and the blindness, and the sin, I have beheld and been ready to weep over,–yea, all the anguish of the children of men, which sometimes wraps me round like sudden darkness—I can bear with a willing pain, as if I was sharing the Redeemer’s cross.   For I feel it, I feel it—infinite love is suffering too—yea, in the fulness of knowledge it suffers, it yearns, it mourns; … sorrow is then a part of love, and love does not seek to throw it off.  It is not the spirit only that tells me this—I see it in the whole work and word of the gospel.  Is there not pleading in heaven?  Is not the Man of Sorrows there in that crucified body wherewith he ascended? And is he not one with the Infinite Love itself—as our love is one with our sorrow?”

As Thich Nat Hanh said: Of course we have to have suffering, otherwise how would we ever learn compassion?

This is not to excuse the shameful separations forced on these families by our government.   Arguments about Beauty and Love aren’t going to end their suffering.  But as Elliot and Emerson, the Christian voice and the Transcendentalist,  point out, we can, and we must,  find common ground in a world of suffering through the compassion it awakens in us.

Dinah’s letter may be the best explanation of Christian love I’ve ever read.

June 15, 2018

George Elliot on the Sacraments: What A Way with Words!

I just came across this passage in George Elliot’s first novel Adam Bede written in the year 1859.   In case you’ve forgotten, George Elliot was a pen name for Mary Anne Evans (the pseudonym was to insure that people would take her novels seriously).

Elliott has just described carpenter Seth Bede’s proposal of marriage to Dinah, the pretty young Methodist preacher of the story, but he’s out of luck.  Dinah gently tells Seth her religious duties have to come first—he’s a good man, but she will never marry. Seth is heartbroken, and Elliot, in a beautiful ode to love, lets her sympathy for the poor young man’s unrequited adoration tumble out onto the page, writing that this sort of profound, pure love of a man for a woman is “hardly distinguishable from religious feeling.”   In fact, she writes, all of our deepest feelings of love share this religious quality,

“…whether of woman or child, or art of music.  Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.”

That’s it exactly: the divine mystery of the universal sacraments, found in “our emotion in its keenest moment”—the birth of a child, the sexual attraction of our best beloved, the power of the arts, music, and nature transform us from mere primates into something else, something that brings us into the realm of the divine.

July 26, 2017

The Fantastic Power of Music: A Note from 1667

When the diarist Samuel Pepys went out to the theatre one night in the late 17th century, something truly amazing happened.   The play was Massinger and Dekker’s The Virgin Martyr, and at one point an angel appears in a kind of Christian deus ex machina. The recorders, a relatively new instrument at that time in England, began playing as the angel descended and Pepys was completely blown away.  In one of the most exquisite passages of his diary he writes:

“But that which did please me beyond any thing in the whole world was the wind-musique when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife; that neither then, nor all the evening going home, and at home, I was able to think of any thing, but remained all night transported, so as I could not believe that ever any musick hath that real command over the soul of a man as this did upon me.”

I’m sure this has happened to you.   You hear music so thrilling, so soul-piercing that you actually feel sick, like life is hardly worth living anymore because a different world has been revealed, a divine world far from the everyday concerns of this one.   It’s a siren song that makes your heart yearn for something you can’t even describe, and it stays with you for days.

That’s the Sacrament of the Arts.

This “transportation” that “commands your soul” can also come from a play, from a book, from a painting, a statute, or a song. And yes, Pepys gets it exactly right– it’s like being in love for the first time, when that glorious feeling seizes you, grips you, binds you to that other human being who has shown through the most secret acts of intimacy, that you are loved in return.  That’s a sacrament too.

The Virgin Martyr is rarely played anymore, and I’m not sure that particular bit of wind-music has been preserved, but what Pepys is describing has not been lost– it’s there for all of us to experience, not just when we fall in love, but also when we find that ineffable connection to the arts that ravishes us to our very souls.