Smiling Through the Tears
Sep 2nd, 2009 by Bill
Smiling through the Tears
At the beginning of February this year I gave an address called Lacrimae Rerum, ‘the tears of things’. It was inspired by a passage in Virgil’s Aeneid in which Aeneas weeps as he looks at representations of the Trojan War, and laments, ‘There are tears at the heart of things, and men’s hearts are touched by what human beings have to bear.’ The address went on to suggest that all of us are born to suffer as a condition of life, and that the realisation that this is so should engender feelings of compassion for suffering humanity within us all. At the end of the address I said that one of our greatest human qualities was the ability to smile through the tears, and I promised that one day I would preach on this. But I kept postponing it, and then, a couple of weeks ago, Dorene asked me point blank: ‘How do we smile through the tears?’ and I realised that I couldn’t procrastinate any longer, and I’d better keep my promise. Hence today’s address.
I suppose that the traditional religious answer would be that our suffering here on earth is temporary, and that one day all tears will be dried and we will all live happily together in God’s kingdom, either here on earth or in the celestial realms. In heaven, they tell us, our earthly suffering will seem like a bad dream from which we have thankfully awoken. There’ll be no more pain, no more wars, no more starvation, no more crime, no more unfairness, and no more death. There are numerous scriptural passages which could be used to substantiate this particular hope. A few spring to mind. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without God being aware of it,[1] and that each human being is infinitely more precious than a sparrow. This suggests that, whatever the vicissitudes of life, we are in the hands of a benevolent providence. ‘Death, where is thy sting, or, grave, thy victory?’[2] asks St. Paul when explaining to us that Christ has defeated death by his crucifixion and resurrection. ‘In my Father’s house there are many mansions; I go to prepare one for you,’[3] says Jesus in the Gospel of John, implying that death is just a transition, and that what follows it is better by far than what precedes it. In the Jewish scriptures we read the prophecy that in time to come, ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.’[4] Here is a promise that one day the laws of nature as we presently understand them will be dramatically transformed and life on earth will no longer be a source of pain to any living thing.
While such sentiments may have consoled our ancestors, to many contemporary people they seem like false hopes, ‘pie in the sky’, attempts to sugar-coat the realities of existence. While I do not personally discount the possibility of a life beyond the present one, nor of a benevolent providence – indeed, those of you who listen to me regularly will know that I have often expressed such beliefs – we have no guarantee of either, and so we have to explore ways in which we can come to terms with our own mortality – smile through the tears – without recourse to unproven conjectures about God or about life after death.
We can do this in a number of ways, none of which require us to believe in any metaphysical notions. First, we can refuse to accept the bleak picture of life painted by those tortured souls who seem to have dominated the literary landscape for a century or so. Sometime in the fifties and sixties ‘happy endings’ passed out of literature and film, and it became a mark of sophistication to declare that life was pointless, and even that it would be better never to have been born at all. The plays of Samuel Beckett, which purport to strip life down to its bare essentials, and present human beings inventing ways to escape the boredom and the futility of existence, stem from a view of life which I personally cannot share, and which I suggest most human beings cannot share. Beckett’s uncle described life as ‘a disease of matter’, which is probably the most cynical and pessimistic assessment of existence ever made, but I cannot go along with it. I, no doubt like you, have waded through numerous books, and sat through countless theatrical and cinematic presentations of this depressing view of life, but I’ve never been convinced that it described my experience. Even when I considered such assessments chic and intellectually respectable, cheerfulness kept breaking through. ‘I’m glad I’m alive,’ I would think. ‘I don’t believe any of this miserable stuff, and what’s more, I don’t think the authors really believe it either.’ As Mr. Micawber says in Dickens’ David Copperfield, ‘No man needs to feel the pains of life while he has access to shaving equipment’.
A second way in which we can come to terms with the pains of existence is to recall frequently just how amazing it is to be alive at all. Richard Dawkins, who has been accused of taking the magic out of life by dispensing with God, says in his book Unweaving the Rainbow, that we don’t need God to appreciate the unlikely nature of our existence. He becomes almost mystical as he contemplates the vast chain of accident and coincidence, stretching into the remotest antiquity, which has produced a single human life. ‘The thread of historical events by which our existence hangs,’ he writes, ‘is wincingly tenuous’, and on the statistics of causation alone, the chances of any one of us being born are the same as the odds that ‘a penny, tossed at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco’. The Tibetan Buddhist Sogyal Rinpoche says that, in his tradition, the chances of being born a human being are compared with a turtle swimming in an ocean the size of the universe and coming up with its head through the one rubber ring which happens to be floating there. ‘It’s no more incredible to be born twice,’ said Voltaire when commenting on the doctrine of reincarnation, ‘than it is to be born once.’
Earlier we read together the beautiful poem Out of the Stars, by Robert Weston, which ends:
This is the wonder of time; this is the marvel of space; out of the stars swung the earth; life upon earth rose to love. This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know; out of your heart, cry wonder: sing that we live.
As Robert Weston suggests, it is incredible that human life and consciousness should develop in the way that it has, and to be a participant in it is a cause for joy and gratitude. Think about the odds against your own existence. Had conception occurred at another time, with another egg and another sperm, you would not exist. I feel privileged to exist and I am glad that all the multitudinous circumstances which conspired to bring about my existence conferred upon me this amazing gift. I have lived 64 years and hope to live many more, but despite the suffering I must inevitably endure, I agree with Dorothy’s Monroe’s who says in her poem The Cost that she would choose mortality whatever Fate demanded in return for life,
Death is not too high a price to pay
For having lived. Mountains never die,
Nor do the seas or rocks or endless sky.
Through countless centuries of time, they stay
Eternal, deathless. Yet they never live!
If choice there were, I would not hesitate
To choose mortality. Whatever Fate
Demanded in return for life I’d give,
For never to have seen the fertile plains
Nor heard the winds nor felt the warm sun on sands
Beside the salty sea, nor touched the hands
Of those I love – without these, all the gains
Of timelessness would not be worth one day
Of living and of loving, come what may.
Even the pains of life, the knowledge of my inevitable demise and my uncertainty about a post mortem existence cannot persuade me that life is futile. George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia tells of the time, during the Spanish Civil War, when he was shot in the neck and feared he was about to die. As the stretcher-bearers were taking him to the field hospital across the rough terrain, he remembers cursing the fact that, in his own words, ‘this life, which, when all is said and done, suits me so well was ebbing away.’ For most of us, when all is said and done, life suits us. The cost is high and yet it is not too high. We may lament our mortality and yet we intuitively know that if we were immortal love would be foreclosed to us. Strange as it may seem, it is our very vulnerability, our transience, the consciousness of our capacity to suffer that is a condition of our capacity to love. This was brought home to me very vividly when I was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2002. My condition intensified my response to life and gave me an understanding of love and commitment for which I have ever since been grateful, and it taught me not to live too far into the future. Even in the darkest days of my illness I could not remain downcast for long. I would tell myself that although my death was imminent, it was unlikely to occur today, so I could save my worrying for another time. Maya Angelou, the American poet, makes much the same point in a little piece I came across the other day:
The ship of my life may or may not be sailing on calm and amiable seas. The challenging days of my existence may or may not be bright and promising. Stormy or sunny days, glorious or lonely nights, I maintain an attitude of gratitude. If I insist on being pessimistic, there is always a tomorrow. Today I am blessed.
A little anonymous piece I found on the internet a while ago puts this approach in a nutshell:
The 92-year-old, petite, well-poised, and proud lady, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o’clock, with her hair fashionably coiffed and makeup perfectly applied, even though she is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today.
Her husband of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary.
After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, she smiled sweetly when told her room was ready. As she manoeuvred her walker to the elevator, I provided a visual description of her tiny room, including the eyelet curtains that had been hung on her window.
‘I love it,’ she stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy.
‘Mrs. Jones, you haven’t seen the room …. just wait.’
‘That doesn’t have anything to do with it,’ she replied. ‘Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged… it’s how I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it … It’s a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice; I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do. Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open I’ll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I’ve stored away … just for this time in my life. Old age is like a bank account–you withdraw from it what you’ve put in. So, my advice to you would be to deposit a lot of happiness in the bank account of memories.
Remember the five simple rules to be happy:
Free your heart from hatred.
Free your mind from worries.
Live simply.
Give more.
Expect less.
How do we smile through the tears? We decide we are going to. It’s a choice we have to make every day.
June 14th, 2009
[1] Matthew 10:29
[2] I Corinthians 15:55
[3] John 14:2
[4] Isaiah 11:6