All I’ve been thinking about for days on end is the Texas floods and the children who were swept away. This particular tragedy hits hard personally for many reasons, but such devastating events always challenge my faith and make me react bitterly to people who type out things like “they’re in a better place” because I want to scream: but what about their fear? What about their last, unendurable moments?
People do, of course, respond in that manner, and so, every comments section is filled with a futile back and forth between what feels like blithe hope and caustic anger.1
And it becomes a fight within me about the meaning of everything.
I imagine most people want to believe in something more than the merely material. Love, goodness, humility—these immaterial but indisputably real things—must mean something. And we hope they mean something enduring and eternal. Because what’s the alternative? That life is just randomness and matter? That reality is simply change, decay, death, and oblivion?
Does the flood render its victims’ (and our own) moments of human connection and beauty in all its forms meaningless? Is there an in-between? Is the best we can come up with that you create your own meaning and then, in the end, simply dissolve into energy or some vague conception of love?
I’ve never found that satisfactory enough (and perhaps I’m mischaracterizing people who have found an in-between to live with). For me the question, even before I heard it articulated thus, has always been as poet Franz Wright asks it: “beneath its tumultuous and often incomprehensible surface,” is the world “a vale in which souls are individually, painstakingly crafted one by one” or is it a “slippery, gory, and unspeakable slaughterhouse?”
It can only ever be one or the other to me. Either we are created personally and out of love or it’s all terrible, indifferent death. In the wake of events like last Friday morning’s, I edge towards the latter view. I can only see things through the eyes of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov:
…what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible why they should have to suffer…how will you redeem them? Is it possible?…I don’t want harmony, for love of mankind I don’t want it. I want to remain with unrequited suffering. I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation even if am wrong.
Ivan speaks of children who have suffered at the hands of abusers. That these innocent ones should be avenged in an afterlife and have eternal happiness is not sufficient for him. It is unbearable that they should suffer in the first place.
Yet, I once heard someone say that to life’s most difficult questions there are no answers. There are only stories.
That might seem prettily put but facile to some. It’s always stuck with me, though, perhaps because a person’s life—a person him or herself—is a story. We all have a beginning, middle, and end. We all have limitless poetic depths to our souls, obscured though they might be through weakness or wickedness. Despite the fact that death comes for us all, we have, written into our hearts, an expansiveness that reaches beyond the last page.
This is why I haven’t been able to tear myself from the pictures of those children’s faces. Each was a person with a story. Each person was and still is a story with boundless depths.
This is why, too, the person of Christ, even in these darkest moments, is still so alluring to me. In his letter from prison, De Profundis, Oscar Wilde wrote that Christ’s life “is the most wonderful of poems. For ‘pity and terror’ there is nothing in the entire cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it.”
His story is the story, the living story, through which all our individual stories makes sense. Christ came not to merely philosophize or purvey a set of beliefs but to give his whole self to us. He is the story of love itself. Fr. Jean Corbon writes in The Wellspring of Worship: “the event that is the Cross and Resurrection does not pass away…it is the only true event in history. All other events are dead and will always be dead; this alone remains.”
Maybe another way of putting that sentiment I find consoling would be like this: there are no answers. There is only Christ.
The ending of The Brothers Karamazov is a stumbling block to many readers because it gives no answers. It gives only Christ. It is Christ shining in Alyosha when he cries, “memory eternal for the dead boy!”—the boy, Illyusha, who once cast rocks at him. It is Christ who the dead boy’s classmates perceive in Alyosha when they are overcome and chorus, “We love you, we love you!” to him.
And on and on does Christ animate this final, rapturous scene:
“Karamazov!” cried Kolya, “can it really be true as our religion says, that we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Illyushechka?”
“Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been,” Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy.
“Ah, how good that will be!” burst from Kolya.
“Well, and now let’s end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don’t be disturbed that we’ll be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient, eternal thing, and there’s good in that, too,” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let’s go! And we go like this now, hand in hand.”
“And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya cried once more ecstatically, and once more all the boys joined in his exclamation.
I recently read Jane Gardam’s most well-known novel, Old Filth. It’s a tense, delicately balanced novel about a renowned lawyer, now in his eighties, coming to terms with his unspeakably damaged childhood. Gardam’s Christian sensibility is restrained where Dostoevsky’s spills over, but a central conflict within the protagonist is the same: whether the essential meaning of the world is death or love? And not merely love as a nebulous sentiment, but Love as a person.
Beneath his outward motions of just getting on with the end of his life, Sir Edward Feathers is fearful “of the cruelty at the core of this foul world.” And yet, at a significant moment he is smote with “a great and astounding longing…the longing of a poet, the deep perfect adoring longing of a lover of Christ.”
I don’t have answers, and often I struggle with faith. But I do have that longing for Christ. I want to believe the words a young priest says over two aged, crushed figures in Gardam’s novel: “Remember these Thy children, oh merciful Lord. Heal them and keep them in Thine everlasting arms.”
I want to believe with J.R.R. Tolkien that “there is a place called 'heaven' where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued.” I want to believe, as he says, that “we may laugh together yet.”
I want to believe it for those children. I want to believe it for all of us.
If you’re new here and have just realized, Oh God she’s a Jesus freak2, and want to skedaddle off that subscription, there are no hard feelings. However, I want to be clear that I’m not out to proselytize. This newsletter is a place to share about books I love, books that delight and embolden the soul. I never intentionally skirt around my beliefs, but I do share them when they naturally arise and inform my way of seeing literature.
This is frankly why I’ve turned off comments here. I’m not trying to stir up a debate. I’m just writing for people like me, who are stuck, who are sickened, who are replaying horrors in their heads over and over again and feeling hopeless and helpless.
Guilty. But also, for what it’s worth, Dostoevsky, Gardam, Tolkien, and Wilde were also all a bit mad on Jesus.