I am not a touchy-feely guy. In fact, I am glad that I am not a touchy-feely guy. If it weren’t for the hippies in San Francisco back in the day doing so much acid that they started the trend of guys hugging guys, I would never have hugged a guy in my life and been glad for that, too. You should only hug your mom when she gets old, your kids when they are young, and your wife on special days and that’s it. Otherwise you get what we have now, guys nervously going through the routine of mandatory hugs as they eye the exits wistfully, wishing that someone would pull the fire alarm so that they can make their escape. I know. I’m one of those guys.
Our cultural prejudices, however, even as they might tell the truth of our social being, often do not tell the deeper truth. About love, for instance. As youth, we all heard the French expression (it must be French): “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.” That sounds pretty, but if you have ever been through a major break-up, you might want to argue that point. A bad break-up can ruin your life for months, and maybe years. People leave jobs over this, leave the country, start a goat farm in Idaho, take up residence with a bottle in a paper bag, or whatever. It can become an obsession, and just like drug or alcohol addiction, this obsession can lead to the loss of friends and family and everything else because no one else can understand your pain and everyone is tired of hearing about it. ‘She’s just another (girl); not even that pretty; find someone new and better; one by every minute,’ and so on, and they are right. But they are not right for that time, not when you have just lost. Love is then a misery and a curse, and why the hell did we get away from parents selecting our mates anyway?
Still, it is the truth: it is better to have loved and lost, and I have recently experienced that truth in spite of my near-complete allergic reaction to public displays of affection.
This love has nothing to do with hormonal chemistry and young woman with delicious-smelling perfume. If I had to name a cause, it would have to be my increasing identification with Christ and Christianity, but it is not exclusive. Rather, it is based on the revelation, shocking and coming at unexpected moments, that others are just as completely human as I, and that others, at least at times, suffer from a loss of love. This love usually has nothing to do with Romeo or Juliet, but with a sense of isolation, an isolation that is more profoundly devastating in its way than the loss of romantic love.
This is nothing new. I can in fact remember an episode of the original Star Trek where Captain Kirk (hardly a great philosopher) is taken over by an alien entity who says just that, that our species is “so (desperately) alone” within itself. The newness is with the fullness of the realization. In this fullness, we suffer right along with the other who is suffering. The result of this suffering, though, is not akin to the loss of a romantic love (which is really about the self) with all its misery, but rather returns to us a feeling of completeness that comes in spite of the shared suffering. In other words, through empathy and all its pain, we come to feel fulfilled; by suffering the pain of loneliness of others, we lose our own sense of loneliness and emptiness.
This is the kind of love that it is better to have, even as it guarantees us suffering. It is, in a practical sense, obvious that by sharing others loneliness we decrease our own, even as this sharing is unspoken. But this has a far more profound side that is explicit in the suffering of Christ, something so profound that I struggle to put it into words or even to understand it internally. It is the startling realization that creation itself has willfully chosen to suffer along with us in our isolation, so that this most elemental of human problems can be solved - a problem which in one way or another is at the bottom of all man-made misery. And there is no reason for creation to do this other than for love.
This means that love truly is at the bottom of everything. It also means that in suffering we are liberated, which is something the saints have always understood and that I really cannot. And yet, even so, even as suffering occurs, its liberating aspects become clear.
We might say that this is true in sharing other’s loneliness, but what about physical suffering?
God, I hate it, even as I get older and experience it more and more. We could get really metaphysical here by attaching physical pain to revelation, but we do not have to start there. Rather, we can begin by putting into words what many have experienced, even as it makes little apparent sense: that through physical suffering, we also learn about love and begin to solve the fundamental problem of loneliness. It is simply true, and any reasoning must begin with the truth, no matter how unexpected.
Perhaps it can be boiled down to this: when we are healthy and fit, we feel as if we are beyond the bounds of nature, a world unto ourselves that does not have to pass through the cycle of life and death. When we are not, when we are ill and weak or in pain, we are brought back into the true cycle in which all of nature is involved. We then are forced to realize our shared vulnerability with all living things, and in this, like prisoners of war, we share a bond that is deeper than common friendship and cordiality. We come to share something more like the bond of comrades in arms, a bond that can allow us – can even demand us – to be willing to sacrifice ourselves for others.
This shared suffering is our reality, and the depth of our community is based on how open we are to this reality. If we were perfectly aware of our situation, we would naturally form a bond of love with humanity. Many already have this bond, although imperfect, with their family, and others with their tribe or nation, but to be truly aware is to have that bond with all of creation. It is what Christ has, and what all truly inspired spiritual leaders must have.
Still, we don’t have to be gurus to experience this depth. It can be given to anyone through grace, which is often delivered to us through suffering. My personal experiences probably have something to do with the diminished capacities and infirmities of age, but it doesn’t matter. The central mystery of the universe still resolves around the same premise: that it is all apiece and desiring that everything understands this in its own way. So it is that the eternal heavens must understand the weakness and suffering of the finite, just as we must understand, through our bond of weakness, our attachment to the eternal. It all seems so complicated, but it is not; rather, it is sublime, like the precise spiral of a sea shell.
This curve of the truth brings us around to the mystery of the sacrificial Christian God. In his eternal presence, he must fulfill the unity of his creation by experiencing finitude and pain. In this, he unites his eternal life and joy through his suffering with our suffering. And in his guise as a mortal, he insists that we unite with all humankind in sympathetic love so that we may realize eternal completeness, and in this, God’s eternal bliss.
It is so simple yet so difficult, as sleek and slippery as an eel. If we could put it onto a bumper sticker, we might just say that “It is better to have lost before we might love.”
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