Money crises. A child’s tragic death. Forced exits. The topics in this issue can churn up currents of melancholia. Few of us find it easy to live with life’s nasty facts.
A personal incident: one night as my wife, Jeanette, and I lay in the dark, nearly asleep, she said, “Somewhere in the world, right now, someone is having a baby.” Jeanette’s tone of voice clearly indicated her love of babies and the process of having babies.
“Yes,” I replied, “and today in the U.S., fifteen teenagers committed suicide and four hundred attempted it.”
Jeanette was jolted. “That’s the difference between us,” she said. “I think of something beautiful-like having a baby-and you think of terrible things.”
She was right, and I felt sad. What a drag I can be. I recalled author Walter Wangerin’s recounting his courtship with Thanne, who made him want to laugh; she made him happy despite his “characteristic tendency toward gloom.”
When I read his confession of gloominess, I felt relieved. I wasn’t the only one. But that was little comfort. Are all of us gloomy spouses put with lively women to douse their joie de vivre? The stories of tortured poets and authors-and legions of pastors-often involve long-suffering mates.
Strange, the roots of gloominess. The brutal scenes of an outrageous world that so often cloud my spirits come, in fact, from my dismay at the loving Father’s world run amuck. At times, it seems the giant smokestacks of Auschwitz, with children hanging by their necks from scaffolds, form a massive mural in my mind. It blends with TV clips and photos of today’s children brutalized in wars, and children cast broken into America’s city streets. It’s no Sunday school curriculum. Reality is ugly.
Yet my rational mind also insists that those images are only half of reality. What about earth’s beauties: the drama of birth, of selfless love, of hope and resurrection, of laughter. We who are gloomy must come into the sunlight of those like Jeanette who see equal truths.
That’s one reason I peruse New Yorker cartoons: to see the other side, to observe how the secular mind views our human foibles.
Some may see nothing funny about the little cartoon figure on this page. But consider his face as the heavens open and Cecil B. De Mille Majesty thunders at him with an absurdly light message. Having presumably heard Andy Warhol’s idea that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, he now knows he won’t be. In light of recent scandals, perhaps it’s a magnificent boon.
At our church, Sunday’s sermon explored the two sides of the gospel: evil and hell contrasted with redemption and marriage feasts. Both are realities. The preacher observed that our most joyous revelry on earth is tame contrasted with the laughter and celebrations yet to come.
I needed that message-as I need my wife’s wise optimism. We are all so different, with such great interdependence. The community of faith is for the strong and the weak. But we are all, as Tournier tells us, strong and weak in different ways . . .
Recently, our church was devastated. Sheri and Joel Scandrette, our youth directors, had just been graduated from college. They were strongly committed, and everyone loved them. They also deeply loved each other, and Sheri was six months’ pregnant.
One Monday morning, Sheri was killed in an auto accident. Pages of text could not begin to describe the unthinkable sorrows of those days in our congregation. But one among many thoughts fits here-that Joel and Sheri’s family, and our pastor, who had previously lost a teenage daughter, and all the congregation did have each other.
The twin realities of stunning grief and the presumptuous hope of the gospel powerfully invaded the congregation. All of us were weak; all were, in various ways, strong. We had God and each other, and therefore the belief that even an absurd, outrageous event will not forever be a thing of gloom.
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