Mourning, weeping, and needing an attitude adjustment
I'm not okay (I promise).
This week I’ve been working on getting an attitude adjustment. Embarrassingly, one of the things I struggle most with is a reflex to focus on the negative. I want it to be an occasionally useful trait, as in, perhaps, being able to see when and how relationships don’t serve me, but just because you’re unhappy and able to see clear as day what’s wrong with a situation, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you can do anything about it. And in my experience, chronic low-grade melancholy often retards the ability or motivation to act, so no, it isn’t useful to me in any way whatsoever, and I’m trying to change it. Once, I was fretting to an ex of mine about how I couldn’t seem to write poetry anymore. “I spend so much time thinking (read: ruminating) but none of it amounts to anything I could possibly write about,” I said. “Joan,” he said, “I need you to stop spending so much time in your head, and spend a little more time in your wrists.”
If you follow me on Twitter, which you should, because I’m perfect and beautiful and hilarious, you may have seen that this week I was dismayed by the general state of many men I interacted with. I love men; I find their company to be endlessly novel, except when it isn’t, and men often have an ability to help me see my life with a fresh and beautifully pragmatic perspective that I’m incapable of having on my own. For example, once, when I was coaching a swim practice to adults of varying levels, I had to make essentially three modifications to the workout to meet the different abilities among my athletes. I was doing what felt like endless amounts of math in my head to keep the intervals and sets straight. My brain was a mess of checking and rechecking my figures, then forgetting the figures, redoing the math, yadda yadda. At the end of practice, one of my male athletes commented, “How do you keep all of that straight? Do you use an app?” Holy frick. It hadn’t even occurred to me that there might be a concrete solution to the problem I was having. Thank you to the male brain.
But these last few weeks I’ve found that men have been disappointing me in distinctly masculine ways. So many dudes I’ve encountered seem to think it’s acceptable to casually remark on women’s bodies, or else they treat women like they’re some kind of avatar in a video game that they can switch on and off, and not, to use a really tired phrase, human beings, with feelings and attachments and inner worlds. It reminds me of that dirtbag opening line to My Chemical Romance’s absolute banger “I’m Not Okay (I Promise),” when Gerard way sings with his high-camp, almost vaudevillian drama and his rolling brashness, “Well, if you wanted honesty, that’s all you had to say.” Hey! You shouldn’t have to say that. Whenever you speak or write, you’re engaging with high-risk-high-reward metaphysics and teleology. What I mean is that language has a purpose: to tell the truth. And when two human beings of any station in life engage with one another, the purpose is ultimately to lead them to their glorification, and we have got to respect one another. C. S. Lewis writes about this in his lecture “The Weight of Glory”:
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit— immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.
I feel like in these last weeks I’ve been bearing witness to so much disregard for others: jokes taken ten paces too far, blatant rudeness, treatment of women by men as trivia. I was mad about it! I’m still sort of mad about it, though the feeling isn’t as raw.
But I need an attitude adjustment. I think in some ways I have a right to be upset about these things, but what’s the point? And why should these things overshadow the beautiful interactions I’ve had with gracious, kind men recently? (Women, too, but I’m talking about dudes here, because I’m boy crazy.)
In one such positive interaction, a really great dude I recently became friends with gave me a rosary. This past Friday, before going to sleep, I used it to pray the Sorrowful Mysteries: The Agony in the Garden, The Scourging at the Pillar, The Crowning With Thorns, The Carrying of the Cross, and The Crucifixion and Death. I found that praying these was an excellent medicine for my soul in getting my much-needed attitude adjustment. There are a few obvious routes you can use to get to gratitude and joy from the Sorrowful Mysteries. You can say, “Wow, I’m so glad I’m not being tortured and nailed to a cross right now.” But I don’t love the comparison game because that sort of comparison dwells in our minds while feelings of sadness and ingratitude dwell in our hearts, and it’s only very rarely that our minds can do our hearts much good in the moment. And besides, sorrow is like a liquid that grows in proportion to its container: all-filling and fitted to every contour of its beholder’s form. This is why, I think, it’s impossible to truly compare pain. Plus, this type of gratitude always seems like a close cousin of rejoicing in another’s miserable lot: better you than me!
The other avenue you can take from the Sorrowful Mysteries to prayers of thanks, and one I can get down with more easily, is simply being aware of the immensity of the sacrifice: thank you, Christ, for enduring this for me. Thank you for feeling the agony of every horrific sin that has ever been and will ever be committed. Thank you, Mary, for your grief.
But the approach that speaks most deeply to my heart and helps me actually address the root of my immobilizing tendency to focus so intently on the bad, arrested by my own sensibility, is the one that actually gets you down in the mud of the sorrow, acknowledging these mysterious events as, in many lights, the worst case scenario for two beautiful and grace-filled humans who did not deserve it, Christ and His Mother. Imagine Mary, having to see her Son, whom she loved both as her God and as her only Child, the Heart of her heart, so brutally beaten, stripped, and publicly humiliated. Imagine the devastation she must have felt when they announced the punishment He would be issued for no crime whatsoever. I think she must have wanted to take His place, but knew she couldn’t. If I were Mary, it would have been so easy for me to become embittered and angry with God. No, Lord, I can imagine myself saying. Why would You give me this, the Love of my love, only to allow for His degradation, His misery, His abject suffering? How could You?
Instead, Mary bore witness. Who knows how well she understood why it had to be that way? Nonetheless she accepted it without a single break in her faith or servitude to God. And part of faith, of course, is joy. Not a joy contingent upon diversion from your pain, but a celebration of the pain itself. And a peace even through the worst possible imagined disaster as it plays out: you can watch your most Beloved die, painfully, you can see the worst of your fears realized torturously before you, and yet by faith you can say without reservation, “Yes, Lord, may it be done unto me.”
You may have read about how last week I met with my confessor. I was a sorry mess then. I was partly joking, but I said to him, laughing a little bit even as I was crying, “Father, my life is a mess, and I don’t have any friends, and I’m broke.” (None of this is even really true, but I was “in it,” as they say.)
“Why don’t you have any friends?” he asked.
“Well, I forged almost all of my adult friendships before I started to believe again,” I said, “and over time I just lost everything I had in common with them.”
He looked at me with such compassion, as if his heart were breaking with mine. “So loneliness is the price of your faith,” he said.
And it is, though only for now, I hope. And alongside that I’m learning some really tough lessons about the ways I hurt myself through sin for the first part of my life. But here is why gratitude is the order of the day: first of all, my life is not all bad. I do in fact have so much love and warmth in my life, and I feel God more tangibly with me now than at almost any chapter. I could focus on growing those areas more, instead of moping, dawdling around in what I dislike about my life. And more importantly, even if loneliness is the price of my faith forever, even if my worst case scenario plays out and I die wretched and alone with no achievements or family, my life is deeded toward glory and peace and company, such good company, with others who were willing to live through horror and sorrow for the sake of seeing our Lord just once, but once and for all, once and nothing else ever again. So yes, my God. I love You: let it be done as You will.
Hi Joan, fantastic piece of insight into your world and your continuing journey with God.
This is really beautiful, thank you!