Dear friends,
Thank you so much for subscribing to this newsletter! I am excited to share works of art that have helped me to think more deeply about empathy, life, and faith.
The season of Advent is certainly an appropriate time to talk about the need for greater empathy. We sometimes need to be reminded that Advent creates a space to acknowledge the waiting, the longing, the darkness, and the pain that reminds us of our need for Christmas, the moment when embodied heaven touched earth and lingered for a lifetime among us. The incarnation of Christ is the most profound, complete act of empathy ever known to humanity. And as we wait for the glorious celebration of his birth, his resurrection, and his return, we need to learn to wait, to see, to hear the the many iterations of pain, sorrow, and struggle both in our own lives and the lives of those around us. Without the very tensions created by the hard stuff of being human, there would be no need for the revelation that is Christmas.
In this first newsletter, I want to linger in the protracted darkness that longs for light by discussing a poem and a song that relay very human experiences of pain that need transcendent relief. The first artistic representation of Advent darkness does not highlight sin or evil; rather, it focuses on the pain of an involuntarily broken mind. Every fall I teach the harrowing, beautiful poem “Dejection: an Ode” by British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, perhaps the first poem written in the English language about the experience of clinical depression. Like his good pal Wordsworth, Coleridge was very intrigued by the work of philosopher Immanuel Kant on the nature of human perception. And in “Dejection,” Coleridge illustrates the existential experience of a sort of bifurcated perception: he knows about goodness, beauty, and truth —he can even see the beauty of the hazy moon rays on a beautiful night. But his perception is filtered by an inner darkness that blackens his ability to feel their reality in a meaningful way:
“Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!”
In discussing this poem with students, I often play the heartrending, luscious song “I See a Darkness” written by Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy) and covered by Johnny Cash. The song, like Coleridge’s poem, renders the experience of suffocating darkness brought upon by depression.
Coleridge begins his poem with an epigraph about an impending storm:
“And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.”
When a storm metaphor is used to describe the mind in literature, it often indicates a sort of fearful chaos that the speaker would want to avoid. But Coleridge longs for the storm—because inner chaos and pain would at least be a feeling that could remind him of his lived humanity:
“Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
And sent my soul abroad,
Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!”
The poet laments that the very gifts he has been given, “my shaping spirit of Imagination” is lost when depression numbs his heart, mind, and artistic capabilities. As he looks at the very natural world that is the central inspiration of his poetry, he can only admit, “And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!”. The “passion and the life, whose fountains are within” have dried up, and he is inert, physically and emotionally.
I recognize that this is a very sad poem to read during the week leading up to Christmas, especially as it has no happy ending. But the poem is a very raw snippet of the life of one whose inner darkness felt unending, even when the world around him appeared to be full of cheer. Although he wants to be happy, to see and feel the reality of beauty, he cannot. He is paralyzed.
For sake of space and time, I will not discuss the entire poem, but I encourage you to read it in its entirety here. It provides us with an opportunity to learn how to better empathize with someone experiencing an altered sense of perception beyond their control. Although our brief “participation” in Coleridge’s experience of chronic mental illness via his poem is just a first step towards empathy, it is a step in love.
Musician and composer Sufjan Stevens also writes quite a bit about mental health struggles, the chaos within the human mind and heart. But alongside these songs, he also reminds us of beauty and hope (as does Coleridge in many other poems). “That was the Worst Christmas Ever!” is a song about a childhood Christmas that feels more like the groaning of Advent than it does like celebration:
Going outside
Shoveling snow in the driveway, driveway
Taking our shoes
Riding a sled down the hillside, hillside
Can you say what you want?
Can you say what you want to be?
Can you be what you want?
Can you be what you want?
Our father yells
Throwing gifts in the wood stove, wood stove
My sister runs away
Taking her books to the schoolyard, schoolyard
In time the snow will rise
In time the snow will rise
In time the Lord will rise
In time the Lord will rise
Silent night
Holy night
Silent night
Nothing feels right
This is one of the most real, touching, and complete Christmas songs I have ever heard. This picture of hope and redemption in the midst of a very dysfunctional family situation speaks reality into the plasticized, hunky-dory notions of Christmas gatherings depicted in so much Christmas-related rhetoric. For many people, family harmony and vacuum-packed faith are not the reality of Christmas, and Stevens emphasizes the brokenness, of a family, of an individual, that needs some sort of healing.
For many, Christmas is not a happy time. Maybe a great deal of this is due to the fact that the falsified notions of peace, love and joy embodied in plastic smiles and jolly music highlight the pain of family discord, questions about faith, the hardness of life. This song does not ignore the hardships, pain and dysfunction, yet emphasizes that this is exactly the real reason for Christmas (literally, a mass for Christ).
The violent details of a parent throwing a child’s presents into the fire and a daughter running away from home both offset the soft, breathy singing voice, calling attention to the consistent presence of both beauty and pain that is the disturbing mixture of our real lives: “Silent night, holy night; silent night, nothing feels right… / in time the snow will rise, in time the snow will rise / in time the Lord will rise, in time the Lord will rise.” Pain. Violence. Ugliness. Redemption. Resurrection.
Coleridge and Stevens both relay the pain of being paralyzed within one’s own deeply broken circumstances when the world around you is full of beauty and celebration. It is helpful to remember that Christ himself was the ultimate worldly misfit, as were the prophets foretelling his coming:
“He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.”—Isaiah 53:3
The incarnate God of Christmas can hold our tensions together: “Silent night, nothing feels right.” And there is a reality beyond the lived experience of pain. As musician Nick Cave says in his recent newsletter “The Red House Files:”
“Hope and optimism can be different, almost opposing, forces. Hope rises out of known suffering and is the defiant and dissenting spark that refuses to be extinguished. Optimism, on the other hand, can be the denial of that suffering, a fear of facing the darkness, a lack of awareness, a kind of blindness to the actual. Hope is wised-up and disobedient. Optimism can be fearful and false. However, there exists another form of optimism, a kind of radical optimism. This optimism has experienced the suffering of the world, believes in the insubordinate nature of hope and is forever at war with banal pessimism, cynicism and nihilism.”
Christmas reminds us to have radical, seemingly unlikely optimism that is rooted in the radical, seemingly unlikely birth of God in a lowly manger.
I want to leave you with perhaps my favorite ever Advent quote. It’s long! But I encourage you to read to the end.
“For many, Christianity is just a beautiful dream. It’s a world in which everyday reality goes a bit blurred. It’s nostalgic, cozy, and comforting.
But real Christianity isn’t like that at all.
Take Christmas, for instance: a season of nostalgia, of carols and candles and firelight and happy children. But that misses the point completely.
Christmas is not a reminder that the world is really quite a nice old place. It reminds us that the world is a shockingly bad old place, where wickedness flourishes unchecked, where children are murdered, where civilized countries make a lot of money by selling weapons to uncivilized ones so they can blow each other apart.
Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don’t light a candle in a room that’s already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that’s so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are. The light shines in the darkness, says St. John, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Christmas, then, is not a dream, a moment of escapism.
Christmas is the reality, which shows up the rest of ‘reality’. And for Christmas, here, read Christianity. Either Jesus is the Lord of the world, and all reality makes sense in his light, or he is dangerously irrelevant to the problems and possibilities of today’s world.
There is no middle ground.
Either Jesus was, and is, the Word of God, or he, and the stories Christians tell about him, are lies.”
--N.T. Wright, For All God’s Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church
Thank you for reading!
Mary
Thank you to Victoria Emily Jones (check out her writing!) for an introduction to the beautiful painting above.
Christopher Ruane (American, 1981–), “The Nativity,” 2014. C-print, 52 × 48 in. Photo via christopherruane.com.