Whatever we love will in time be lost. Loyalties turn. Economies crumble. Jobs and places long dreamt of elude us. Worst of all, our loved ones perish. “Whoever lives long,” Dr. Johnson tells us, “must outlive those whom he loves and honours.” But I shouldn’t belabor the point. We are all much too familiar.
What should we do in response to so much loss and heartache? Most of us, deliberately or not, adopt a strategy. But there are only so many strategies out there. Which is wisest?
“None is wisest,” you might object. “It’s whatever works for you.” But surely some responses to heartache won’t work, such as wallowing in despair. And if some don’t work well for anyone, perhaps one works best for all. We can’t decide the matter in advance of examining the options.
My own view is that Christianity (and perhaps other monotheisms) have much to offer here. But let’s start with the alternatives.
Strategy #1. Ignore reality
All that we love will perish. One solution is just to avoid thinking about it.
The trouble is, of course, that the world will not allow this illusion to persist for long. Heartache is a wedding crasher. Besides, there is one desire this strategy automatically foregoes—the desire to know the truth. Most of us want to be in touch with reality. We prefer real friends to hired actors, even if we would never know the difference. And because this strategy avoids the truth, it also foregoes a second desire—the desire for personal growth. This, as any mature adult understands, requires us to face truths even when they are painful to us.
Strategy #2. Get what you want
We suffer when we don’t get what we want. So get it already. A little work and wisdom, and life is not so hard.
This seems our favored strategy at present. Certainly, it has paid dividends. Thanks to applied science, we’re spared from many ugly things, and this should not be discounted. But the deathrate is still 100%. Granted, some think even this can be changed, that one day we will upload our minds to the cloud and download them onto fresh bodies as needed. But to have anything like confidence in such a future would be, to put it mildly, overeager. And even in such a life, disappointment isn't going anywhere. Immortality does not mean someone will publish your novel, requite your love, or grant you that promotion. Heartache has no favorites. And we’re just talking about when we don’t get what we want. The real trouble starts when we do. So you win the gold medal—what happens next? “Meaningless, meaningless,” says the teacher, “all is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
Strategy #3. Resign your cares
We suffer when we don’t get what we want. So why not stop wanting it? Let go of desire. Accept whatever happens. To end suffering, one needn't change the world; one need only change oneself.
This approach to suffering can be found in the Stoic philosophies of the West, and the Buddhist and Hindu philosophies of the East. It relies on a useful insight. Emotions generally are based on guiding concerns. If the economy tanks, this will frighten me only to the extent that it threatens something I love. It may please me, if instead I want society to crumble. Or if I don’t care about society at all, I may hardly notice.
Emotions, then, are based on concerns. And one way to avoid being frightened, or sad, or angry, is to relinquish all concern. The Buddhist Dhammapada, for instance, tells us to tear out desire by the roots:
If its root remains
undamaged & strong,
a tree, even if cut,
will grow back.
So too if latent craving
is not rooted out,
this suffering returns
again & again. (verse 338)
There is some wisdom to this. Sometimes, we do need to resign our desires. If you know you can never become an air-force pilot, it's foolishness to stubbornly go on dreaming of it. Still, most of us would not wish to renounce all desire, all concern. And there's good reason for that.
First, the goal of totally uprooting desire does not appear to be coherent. For it would require great effort and discipline. It would require hours of meditation and moral inventory. Why would we do this unless we desired to uproot desire? The project requires the thing it seeks to destroy.
Second, we are social creatures. We cannot live well without deep and lasting attachments to others. And this automatically opens us to heartache. But we do not think it is morally admirable to forego deep attachments in order to avoid suffering their loss. As Tennyon’s famous lines have it:
I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
These lines resonate, precisely because we see that sorrow is eventually the cost of love, and love is worth the cost.
Third, emotions, for all their bedlam, serve a noble purpose. Imagine you’re watching the sunset, and you’re struck with longing. Your friend, who is with you, agrees it is beautiful, but he feels nothing. Isn’t he missing out? You both know the sunset is beautiful, but it’s you who really gets it. Your friend is like someone who has had roses explained to him but has never stopped to smell them. Without emotion, we are unable to respond to the world with the full depth it deserves. We lose our closest connection with reality. But if we tear out all our cares, of course, we tear out all emotions as well.
Thus, while resigning our desires is sometimes called for, this overall strategy for dealing with heartache leaves much to be desired (no pun).
Strategy #4. Redirect your cares
Christianity leaves plenty of room for intense emotions about worldly affairs. In this, it bears marked contrast with Buddhism. In one folktale, a grieving mother asks the Buddha to raise her son from the dead. He says he will, on one condition: She must bring him a seed from a household that has never known grief. So she sets out, going from house to house, only to find that grief has struck at every one of them. Seeing this, she accepts that death is inevitable.
There is something to this story. Meditation on the grave is the better part of wisdom. But this story bears a striking contrast with another story of loss. Lazarus having died, his sister comes to Jesus weeping:
She fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked. (John 11: 32-34)
Then Jesus raised him from the dead.
Jesus, our example, did not hold back his heart from others. And in his great care and sorrow, he went into the world, and changed it. Christianity permits us to love ordinary things—friends, spouses, gardens, the works—and to love these things intensely.
Yet it warns against loving them ultimately. “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned,” writes Paul Tillich. Our lives are built around a hierarchy of concerns. Our ultimate concern, the thing at the top of our list—that is what we kneel before. We hope it is the one true God, but often it is something else, some local deity. And that is when the darkest, bleakest heartache comes, because the thing at the center of the heart was not meant to be breakable. As St. Augustine tells us, “Wherever the soul of man turns, unless towards God, it cleaves to sorrow, even though the things outside God and outside itself to which it cleaves may be things of beauty” (Confessions 4.10.15).
For Christians, then, it isn't a matter of renouncing our concerns but reordering them. Missing out on the dream-job may grieve the Christian, but it must not break or shatter her. If it does, she may be assured her loves have become disordered.
Like Buddhists, we must address such overgrown desires. But unlike Buddhists, we aren’t killing them; we’re restoring them to health. For it is only in their rightful place that they are healthy at all.
Exactly when does our love for finite things become disordered? When those things become the final answers to existential needs. I mean our needs for identity, for belonging, for personal worth, for meaning, for hope, for wonder. Only God can reach down and touch these depthless yearnings. That dream, that job, that marriage, that city, that salary, that home—as finite goods, they are well and good. As gods, they will devour us.
But where the Christian must beware of wanting earthly things too much, Heavenly things she cannot want enough. The Kingdom of God, eternal union with Christ our Lord—every flame and flicker of yearning within her she may direct upon these things without so much as scorching them. Here at last desire has no bounds. Here at last we may love and never lose.
Summing up
The strategies discussed here may not be all there is. But it seems to me they are the commonest options. Which is loveliest, which can stand up under pressure, you’ll have to decide for yourself. But I’ll take the Christian approach for my money. Creatures who yearn, set in a world that crumbles, face a cruel dilemma: How can we love the ordinary good things of a human life, without being crushed when they perish or elude us? Christianity answers: By giving them only a lesser portion of our love. Then what of the greater portion, the highest and holiest love that is in us? Christianity answers: This we reserve for Almighty God, who was and is and is to come.
Agony, 1912, by Egon Schiele
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