“What can we do? We
must live our lives. Yes, we shall live, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through the
long procession of days before us, and through the long evenings . . . and
there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept . . . And
we will live a life of radiant joy and beauty, and we’ll look back on this life
of our unhappiness with tenderness and we’ll smile. And in that new life we
shall rest, Uncle. I have faith. . . And we’ll look down, and we’ll see evil,
all of the evil in the world, and all our sufferings bathed in a perfect Mercy,
and our lives grown sweet as a caress. I know you’ve had no joy in your life.
But just wait. Only wait, Uncle. We shall rest.” (Combination of two translations of Anton Chekhov)
I fear that, like the rest of the modern literary world, I tend to waffle Pollyanna and Puddleglum. Okay, those of you who know me might raise their eyebrows at the Puddleglum, but he's there. He's there under the slouch. The repeated snooze button. The hovering question: "Am I doing the right thing?"
Recently I've been studying various works in my World Literature class. Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, and Uncle Vanya are just a few. What do these three works have in common? Longing. Intense, unspeakable. Longing to satisfy heart's desires, to be a hero, to be loved and respected. The problem with Emma Bovary is that she looks in all of the wrong places. She searches for love in romantic men when her dull husband's love burns stronger than theirs ever could. She tries to satisfy her desires. Searching . . . searching . . . searching . . . ravenously. Fruitlessly.
At first, I loathed Emma Bovary and thought her actions despicable.
Then I realized that I do the same thing (minus the romantic men part). Don't we all? We look for answers to our hearts' dearest questions. We look for satisfaction for our deepest longings. And we look in all of the wrong places.
Meanwhile, Jesus is waiting.
Why does it take us so long?
And life continues. We long for heroes, to be a hero. We dig out old armor and call ourselves knights, and we scan the landscape for a shiny new helmet. Failing, we'll accept a barber's basin. We strive and we blather and we huff at windmills. But we are forgetting something.
Someone doesn't need to be a knight in shining white armor in order to be a hero. The stuff of heroes walks around us every day--in the smile despite the pain, in the patience despite the wear and tear, in the song despite the inward screams.
Sound like Pollyanna? Maybe. Perhaps I'm prone to fluffiness. Many writers are, but many more "realists" are prone to stark and unmitigated pain. And life isn't like that, especially the Christian life. With Christ, life is gritty but good. Deny the grit and we're naive, but if we deny the good then we're just stupid.
Reading Uncle Vanya reminded me that there is a difference between longing and reality. Reality may not give us what we think we are longing for. Our life might be full of shadows when we had dreamed of only light. Yet what is a world with no shadows? Flat and two-dimensional. Shadows are not simply an absence of light. They prove that the light is real and that the world isn't flat but three-dimensional.
“Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” Psalm 30:5
Of course, we are meant to have this joy here and now. But if it isn't obvious to us, we must, like Puddleglum, believe that there is such a thing as a Sun and live like it. Stop looking for answers and turn to the real Answer. Stop trying to be a grand hero and be a real one. And stop longing for self-created non-realities. Maybe the joy is in front of us and we don't see it; maybe it isn't and we're meant to look beyond to the next life, when we will see "all our sufferings bathed in a perfect Mercy." In either case, the joy is there in the worst of circumstances.
It's real, real, real. Act like it even when it doesn't seem so.
Perhaps Puddleglum wasn't so glum after all.
