If He Could Find It

He had been wont to despise emotions: girls were emotional, girls were weak, emotions—tears—were weakness. But this morning he was thinking that being a great brain in a tower, nothing but a brain, wouldn’t be much fun. No excitement, no dog to love, no joy in the blue sky—no feelings at all. But feelings—feelings are emotions! He was suddenly overwhelmed by the revelation that what makes life worth living is, precisely, the emotions. But then—this was awful!—maybe girls with their tears and laughter were getting more out of life. Shattering!

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The sky is so gray today and it’s cold outside. I should have worn a jacket, but the weather here changes about as rapidly as my mood—which may not be a coincidence, though I leave the task of determining the cause and effect relationship there to someone else—and I realize suddenly that this scene is eerily familiar: in Starbucks with my laptop, looking out the window, sipping coffee and wishing it would rain.

My stomach is twisted into a knot the size of my fist—didn’t I learn once that my stomach is the size of my fist?—and my favorite boots are suddenly uncomfortable. I push my sleeves to my elbows, then give an involuntary shudder and pull them back down to my wrists. A lock of hair falls into my face; I casually tuck it behind my ear. Nothing has ever felt more uncomfortable. The world doesn’t fit me properly today.

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At its roots, anxiety is a fear of loss, a fear of rejection, a fear of meaninglessness. It comes from living without a sense of the providence of God, or from losing it. ~Jenny Driver~

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I’m having lunch with Kahryn in the Atrium at the National Portrait Gallery. Considering the shape and pace of our lives right now, this is a feat requiring roughly the same amount of coordination as the nuclear summit going on six blocks north of us; I will also leave it up to others to decide which meeting is likely to be more beneficial to the world in the long run. (Let me give you a hint: it’s probably the one where there’s no bowing going on.)

We are talking about everything, as we always do, our words whirling from sarcastic work-related anecdotes to shared frustration with some vast injustice in one of our lives, pausing for a few minutes to make time for deep and uncontrollable laughter about something or other that I can never remember afterwards. The laughter is important because if we didn’t laugh we would probably be crying. There is always at least one point at which we say the exact same thing at the exact same time.

But at some point our conversation comes to rest on love and I say, quietly—with perhaps less coherence—sometimes I feel like a sieve, or one of those hanging flowerpots with holes in the bottom. There’s so much leaving my heart and so little, it seems, coming in, and I’m just empty.

She nods.

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He checked himself: showing one’s emotions was not the thing: having them was. Still, he was dizzy with the revelations. What is beauty but something that is responded to with emotion? Courage, at least partly, is emotional. All the splendour of life. But if the best of life is, in fact, emotional, then one wanted the highest, purest emotions: and that meant joy. Joy was the highest. How did one find joy? In books it seemed to be found in love—a great love—though maybe for the saints there was joy in the love of God. He didn’t aspire to that, though; he didn’t even believe in God. Certainly not! So, if he wanted the heights of joy, he must have, if he could find it, a great love.

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This is, of course, not quite fair. My life is full of blessings, so many blessings. I’m aware of them—probably not all of them, but enough to make anyone pause and say, good heavens, what a beautiful and privileged life that girl has been given. And I am grateful for them. Really I am. Sometimes I encounter people whose lives are truly difficult and, believe me, I know. I know that I am blessed to be healthy, to have my material needs met; I know that I am a child of God and loved by my earthly family. I am blessed to see the beauty in the snowdrops and the cloudy sky, to hear it in piano music and in the soaring majesty of the Alleluia! that infuses itself into this season in the life of the Church. I am blessed to be one of the Easter people.

But I have thought about this a lot—for years, really—and I do not think that achieving a sufficient level of gratitude for the blessings I have received is an automatic Get Out Of Jail Free card, as if somehow all I need to do is get holy enough and life will stop being hard. Just look at the lives of Mother Teresa and St. Therese of Lisieux. Look at our Blessed Mother. Look at our beautiful and beleaguered Holy Father. I can hardly compare myself to them in anything but our shared human nature, but the point holds: faithfulness does not carry with it the promise of ease. The trick is to distinguish pain from despair, to differentiate between a life lacking in difficulty and a life lived in serene surrender to it. Between the world’s promise of pefection, which we can never attain, and the heavenly call to infuse our imperfections with the peace of our Lord’s perfect love.

So then my goal is not freedom-from-pain as such; it is joy. And if that’s true—if it’s true that to experience struggle does not constitute failure as a Christian—then it’s okay for me to need things. It’s okay for me to admit that I can’t do it alone. Because I can’t. But we were made to need each other.

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It belongs to the nature of joy to be radiant; it must communicate itself. The missionary spirit of the Church is none other than the impulse to communicate the joy which has been given. ~Pope Benedict XVI, Christmas 2008~

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I have been tearing through new books lately—Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, among others, and both have changed me—but right now I am re-reading A Severe Mercy, the true story by Sheldon Vanauken that manages to be about everything all at once. (All of the uncited quotes in this post are Vanauken’s words.) I have read it twice before but there are still parts that knock me over. In one book, Vanauken writes biography and history, adventure and mystery, theology, philosophy, and poetry. I turn the pages and I find myself immersed in life and death, beauty and stark ugliness, love and pain, and all I can think is: In some small way, this book is about me.

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But in the books again, great joy through love seemed always to go hand in hand with frightful pain. Still, he thought, looking out across the meadow, still, the joy would be worth the pain—if, indeed, they went together. If there were a choice—and he suspected there was—a choice between, on the one hand, the heights and the depths and, on the other hand, some sort of safe, cautious middle way, he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths.