Creating Love Out of Tragedy

Tragedy and Faith

The man had lost everything. His four brothers had died, as had his parents. A few weeks ago, his marriage fell apart. When his wife left him, she took the dog. He had no children. Sick and unable to work, his income was limited, and he couldn’t pay his rent. Now he was in the hospital. He felt scared and overwhelmed.

Once up a time, he believed in God. He’d grown up Christian, but the message he heard was that if you believed in God and prayed for what you needed, God would take care of you.

He explained to me how, after hearing that promise, he had prayed with all the fervor of a young child. He had prayed that his parents would love him, that his father would stop hitting him, that his mother would come home sober. No matter how hard he begged God to intercede, however, God did nothing. God never did anything. And it wasn’t just him. Millions of people suffered. Tragedy was everywhere. What kind of God would let that happen?

No God, that’s what. Therefore, God didn’t exist.

I agreed that he could be right.

Sometimes, when we are given permission to doubt, we discover what we believe. Together, he and I explored different

It seemed to take a moment for him to absorb that I had just given him permission to doubt, even to deny God entirely. That’s when he decided he wanted to believe. But what sort of God could he believe in?

Together, he and I explored different ways to understand God, different answers to that age-old question of why we must suffer. Although we reached no conclusions, he decided God might be there, after all. In fact, maybe he would go back to church.

Living Without Answers

He didn’t figure out why we suffer. At least not that day. Perhaps he realized the question was unanswerable, though I suspect he saw, instead, that it wasn’t the right question. Does someone owe us a reason for our setbacks, an explanation for every hell we face? Who are we to live a perfect life? Is such a thing sustainable or even desirable?

In the end, life is less about why, and more about how. How do we get through the day? How do we find joy in the peace of each moment? What gives us courage, strength, the desire to live, even when living tears us apart and breaks our hearts?

For that patient, the answer was faith. He was still trying to understand what that meant. He knew it wasn’t faith in a Santa Claus God who showers us with presents, nor in any kind of god we can define with language. But maybe faith could be found in tenderness, holiness, love. Such a faith does not claim to understand. Instead, it reminds us that tomatoes ripen if we but wait, that shadows are cool on a summer’s day, that water quenches our thirst, that rocks, and sperm, and bread, and laughter, and clasped hands are all holy.

Where’s the answer in this? The answer is that we trust in life, or we don’t. When the patient accepted that he could never know what God was, nor how God might define our days, he found peace. Things don’t always turn out okay, but they will turn. They will become, evolve, change. Freedom is not only the shattering of chains, but also the whisper in our heart. Love, the grain of sand that works its way into everything. At that moment, that was all he needed to know.

Tragedy in Myth

But he is not the only person who has struggled with this question. Millennia ago, the Greeks filled their myths with tragedy, as if trying to discern an answer to the problem of unpredictable deities. Apparently, they decided that the fault lay in our defects of character.

Take the tale of the hunter, Orion. After falling in love with the maiden Merope, he sought out her father, Oenopion, to beg for the young woman’s hand in marriage. Oenopion was the son of Dionysus and shared the deep passions of his father. Loving his daughter beyond measure, he longed to possess her. Nothing would convince him to give her up.

Of course, Oenopion knew better than to say such a thing aloud. Instead, he pretended that Orion was not good enough for her, that he must prove himself. So the older man set one task after another for his daughter’s suitor, yet no matter how much he did, the love-sick man could never do enough.

Growing increasingly frustrated by the delays, Orion broke into Merope’s bed chamber one night and raped her. Furious, Oenopion blinded Orion and flung him onto a distant seashore. [1]

What a tragedy. Everyone was miserable. Not even Oenopion got what he wanted, for though his daughter still lived in his house, by refusing to let her go, he lost her. You do not earn love by imprisoning your beloved.

Will they never learn?

In Greek myths, at any rate, it seems that they don’t. Or, if they do, we are not told about it. These are action-packed stories filled with proud and impetuous beings. Wisdom requires internal reflection and a humble heart, which are not common in the myths of any culture. They may not be common in human lives, either.

Tragedies We Cannot Bear

Not long ago, I spoke with a man whose wife is beset with mental illness. After thirty years, she wants to leave him. He is confused and angry. He has given her everything she ever wanted. Of course, as even he will admit, he has not given her time or tenderness, but that’s not his way. No one should expect it of him. Of course, that doesn’t make her long for it any less.

Hearing them talk to each other, it becomes obvious that hurt and resentment run so deep inside them that they cannot listen. Instead, they blame their partner and justify themselves.

At one point, the husband said, “I don’t know what to do.”

I asked him, “Do you want some ideas?”

He said, “No.”

I wasn’t surprised. He believes he has been wronged. If he needed ideas, if someone could help him, that would imply he was partly responsible for their tragic marriage. He might be expected to change. He couldn’t bear to do that.

Mental illness can cause terrible suffering. People’s lives fall apart; families splinter. The pain can be unrelenting. Maybe there’s no point in getting ideas for what to do because nothing we do will make it better.

We can, though, make it worse. We can refuse to listen, or we can cling to self-righteousness. Instead of pausing, considering someone else’s feelings, questioning the validity of our worldview, we relentlessly pursue what we think will make us happy. Orion and Oenopion, even the husband mentioned above, confused force with kindness. They became stuck in their suffering.

More than mental illness, more than our longing for love, such stuckness keeps us doing the same thing over and over again, though it doesn’t work. That is the tragedy beyond bearing.

The Suffering of the One for the Many

All religious traditions offer ways to make meaning out of tragedy. In the Jewish tradition, there are, for instance, the Lamed-Vovnik, the thirty-six righteous ones who, by their very goodness, protect the human race from annihilation. If one were to do evil, the spell would be broken, and God would destroy us. It may seem like a funny way to do things, but God is inscrutable.

In his novel about a family line of Lamed-Vovniks, The Last of the Just, André Schwarz-Bart recounts the life story of the Lamed-Vov in each generation, ending with the death of Ernie Levy in a concentration camp. The book is a Holocaust story, a description of how we sacrifice one or two or a hundred thousand in some misguided belief that this will make life better for everyone else. It is a story of how God continues to require sacrifices. In Shwarz-Bart’s novel, the lamed-vovnik are poor, often reviled. They die terrible deaths. What makes their misery so horrible, though, is their unusual compassion.

“The Lamed-Vov are the hearts of the world multiplied,” he writes. [2] They hold all the grief of the universe, all the sadness that swells inside our own hearts, and they ease our pain. Yet by doing so, they endure an unspeakable horror. Does God truly require such a thing to keep the world from falling apart? You would think there had been enough martyrs in the world. Moses never got to step onto the promised land. Jesus died on the cross. Christians were crucified by Rome and Jews tortured by Christians. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were murdered. Surely that is enough? Must God still make the thirty-six righteous ones suffer so the rest of us might survive?

A River of Tears

Of course, suffering is all around us. It is not just the Lamed-Vovnik who know this kind of pain. We all do. God does not guarantee happiness for anyone. No. God guarantees us life, but nothing else, not even existence beyond a breath. Sometimes, even less. So is it surprising that, for some of us, life is like a river of tears?

But is it hopeless? Is there nothing but sadness? No meaning, no purpose? Nothing at all?

According to Schwarz-Bart, it is not hopeless. For instance, God hears us. When he tells the story of Solomon, one of the Lamed Vov, Schwarz-Bart imagines an historian writing this good Jew’s story. He concludes his imagined narrative this way: “O companions of our ancient exile, as the rivers go to the sea, all our tears flow in the heart of God.” [3]

Surely God notices the tears are in his heart. Surely he listens. He cares. But then what?

Well, then, according to Schwarz-Bart, nothing. Speaking of another of those Lamed-Vovs, a man named Israel, he quotes this man as saying, “O God, cover not our blood with thy silence.” [4] Yet over and over, in this book, God says nothing. It seems that Schwarz-Bart is telling us God is not there anymore. The river of tears we shed is for naught.

To Keep the Earth Turning

So what do we do?

We create meaning on our own, and from this meaning, we keep the world turning. For Schwarz-Bart, the survivors of tragedy are the ones who keep the rest of us alive. He is speaking specifically of Holocaust survivors, as when he writes, in The Morning Star, another of his novels, “The day the last survivor disappeared, there would be nothing left but images and words. Then the words and images would die, and the earth itself would stop turning.” [5] Because they suffered, and continued to survive, we might live.

It is not just their suffering that keeps the world turning, however. What sets apart the Lamed-Vovnik and those who survived the Holocaust is their compassion, their goodness, their connection with the holy. Over and over, in Schwarz-Bart’s books, we see that suffering is necessary to open hearts, to make us care. Suffering can make us bitter and hateful, as well, but without it, there would be no art, no laughter, no love.

In her review of Schwarz-Bart’s novels, Ruth Franklin writes, “Like the Lamed-Vovnik of his first novel, Shwarz-Bart suffered on behalf of his characters, unable to admit his suffering was without meaning.” [6] So he gave meaning to suffering. He made a connection between life, that deep, vibrant, full-bodied experience of beingness that is at once joyful and peaceful, and the ache of loneliness, emptiness, and the ravaging of bodies and spirits that the Lamed-Vov take on so we might hurt less, the misery that the Holocaust survivors transform.

Is that the meaning tragedy holds for the rest of us?

Finding A Meaning of Our Own

Though religions and novelists try to make sense of the nonsensical, it is not up to us to decide what meaning lies within the suffering of another. The man who lost his family, his dog, his livelihood must find a way forward that makes sense to him. Will he turn his tragedy into beauty? Does he even care about beauty? Or does he care more about compassion? Or is he content simply to survive?

Many of us get stuck in survival. We scrabble and complain, we rage and storm, we lose ourselves in addictions. That is life. That is being human. We plod on, half asleep, unable to imagine waking up from our numbness. Lost, confused, we can’t remember the name of God.

Jane Kenyon, in her poem, “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks,” tells of one who is love, existing like a divine force within us, though we might not be aware of it. This force brings us food and fragrance, repairs buildings and hearts, offers joy, tends gardens. It is a rushing water, a lover. If we could remember to call its name, it would be there.

But what name is that? Who is this loving source of life? Is it that Santa Claus God who will grant our every wish, until it doesn’t? In Kenyon’s poem, this force offers us all good things. Can we trust that?

Perhaps not. Yet perhaps Kenyon does not entirely trust it, either. In her poem, she inserts a long, white hair. Does that symbolize wisdom? Is it the divine stepping in to take on our suffering? Or does it remind us of aging and death? No matter what we do or say or believe, in the end, life must be answered with death.

Death Vanquished

In the Christian story, death is vanquished. Jesus takes on our sins, like a Lamed-Vovnik multiplied. No matter how much we suffer now, because of Jesus, because of the Lamed-Vov, we will escape death and live in joy and beauty forever.

Of course, that’s a simplified version of the Christian message. Ultimately, it is about love, a love that is more about doing than feeling. We care for one another; hold one another; feed one another. We make the world better so suffering does not have the last word. In the Christian story, it is possible to have happiness without pain.

The reality, though, is that whenever we try to build a community of kindness and compassion, we fail. We might do a better or worse job of it, but that doesn’t mean our efforts will succeed. Needs, resentments, misunderstandings, differing viewpoints – they get in the way. We may try to honor each other, to respect the dignity of everyone – and I mean everyone. We might wish we could love without judgment. Yet how many of us are successful at that?

It’s hard to create a just world. So far, we haven’t figured out how.

Yet there is something we have yet to try. Instead of leaving one another, blaming one another, destroying and shaming and rejecting one another, we could try holding one another. Like the Lamed-Vovnik, we could try being good.

To Cherish One Another

Part of the legend of the Lamed-Vovnik is that these thirty-six people don’t know who they are. They are good because they are good, because they feel the pain in the hearts of others, and they care. For them, goodness is natural.

So who’s to say we aren’t each a Lamed-Vov? Who’s to say there are only thirty-six? Maybe there are so many of these good and generous people that the world will soon be overrun with them. Imagine, good people everywhere, touching objects and plants and animals with their kind hands. Imagine them reaching out and hugging us all.

Why not? If we act as if this were true, we might make it so. Then our tragedies wouldn’t seem as terrible, because we would be holding one another. Maybe this is why tragedy exists, because we are here to cherish our neighbor.

We are not alone. Let us not allow tragedy to convince us that we are. The one who creates us, this compassionate force Kenyon writes about in her poem, is “already with [us]/ when [we] think to call [its] name.” [7] Even when we feel most bereft, love is there.

We humans can create meaning out of anything. Out of the Holocaust, we create life. From loss, we create bounty. From illness and grief, we create companionship. Our human capacity for invention is endless. So let us invent grace, mercy, compassion. Out of tragedy, let us invent a story that brings us closer, binds us in wholeness, deepens our wonder, opens us to the immensity of joy in the universe. If, in our suffering, we hold one another in love, we can make this possible.

In faith and fondness,

Barbara

Credits

1. This version from Greene, Liz and Juliet Sharman-Burke, The Mythic Journey, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000, 19-25.
2. Schwarz-Bart, André, trans. Stephen Becker, The Last of the Just, New York: Overlook Press, 1960, 5.
3. Ibid 6.
4. Ibid 9.
5. Quoted by Franklin, Ruth, “Lamed-Vovnik,” Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2010, https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/141/lamed-vovnik/, accessed 7/23/21.
6. Franklin.
7. Kenyon, Jane, “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks,” Collected Poems, Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005, reprinted by Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49765/briefly-it-enters-and-briefly-speaks, accessed 7/23/21.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

Copyright © 2021 Barbara E. Stevens. All Rights Reserved.