Pierced by Light

Is it morally permissible to be happy in our world? This is a question that I encounter in some variation or other with some frequency. Sometimes it is young adults bemoaning the “state of the world” they’re inheriting (climate change, high cost of housing, bleak employment prospects, depressing dating scene, etc.) and vowing never to bring a child into such a terrible world (I often tell these young adults that they might profit from reading a bit more history). Sometimes it’s activists who look around and see only racism or economic inequality or all the structural barriers preventing this or that marginalized group from flourishing. Sometimes it is people faced with a crushing decision or living in the immediate aftermath of terrible loss. Sometimes it’s people who are depressed, addicted, or anxious. Sometimes it’s people who are simply worn out by life.

There are all kind of articles out there that talk about how this suspicion of happiness is more prevalent on the left than the right (see here, here, and here, for example). Of course, this isn’t to say gloominess is exclusive to the left, just that a general trend is observable. In one article, Ross Douthat sums it up like this:

The left-wing temperament is, by nature, unhappier than the moderate and conservative alternatives. The refusal of contentment is essential to radical politics; the desire to take the givens of the world and make something better out of them is always going to be linked to less relaxed gratitude, than to more of a discontented itch.

I certainly see this in some of the circles I travel in (church and otherwise). There is a dogged moral seriousness to many progressive types. To be happy is, in a sense, to be complacent. And who can be complacent in a world filled with injustice, a world where so many suffer, a world always on the precipice of catastrophe, a world where earnest moral vigilance is always required? Happy people don’t resist, so we must grimly press on! Or something like that.

There are other reasons. I think that in general, people on the left are less likely to embrace any kind of a transcendent narrative that gives meaning to life. They are less likely to be religious, to believe in a hope beyond what human effort and striving can secure. They are less likely to do the kinds of things that lead researchers say objectively lead to greater levels of happiness, like getting married and having children and, yes, becoming parts of religious communities.

And then, of course, there is the question of media and how it shapes the world we see. Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation is laying bare sobering data about how smartphones and social media are having catastrophic effects upon mental health in the young. In a media context that has massive financial incentives to always be producing content that shocks, frightens, causes outrage, self-righteous moral sorting, etc., and which delivers this content through devices that are designed to be addictive, is it any wonder that to many happiness seems not only impossible but impermissible?

In a recent edition of the Red Hand Files, Nick Cave received the following question:

God and I have always been very tight; even in hard times when I’ve been furious at God, God now feels absent.

Very heavy things have happened throughout my life, but I always had an optimism that I could do the work to improve things. But losing young friends to illness, losing a love to some very serious circumstances, some big consequences for doing work that holds people accountable, I’m feeling very heartbroken about the world. It’s the lack of justice that really breaks me and the feeling of helplessness despite all the work I’ve done.

Your work and this beautiful newsletter have been a lifeline for so many. You’re also sensitive to God in the many ways God may show up for us, so I’d love to know how to find my way back.

The question was signed, “LOOKING FOR MY OLD FRIEND GOD, LONDON ENGLAND.” “What a fascinating question,” I thought. And what a way to sign it. Looking for God. Looking for an old friend that’s been lost. Looking for the way back to optimism, to happiness, to connection.

Well, Nick Cave, as is so often the case, responded eloquently and compellingly:

A well-known couplet from Leonard Cohen’s song, Anthem, goes, ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.’ These words had always sounded like a platitude and a little corny to me, but a long, dark journey made me better understand their radical and unsettling nature—that God is often most acutely found in His absence.

This realisation shook me to the core, that the meaning of life – its joy, boundless beauty and love—emerges out of our most devastating losses. I learned that without the savagery of life, love has no true domain, and the relational quality of joy and beauty has no natural way to express itself. I came to understand that although the world’s energising principle is love, joy ultimately declares itself most intensely through our heartbreaks.

As I said, it took a prolonged and painful journey to arrive at this insight, and perhaps that is the road you are on now. The idea that ‘God is love’ is a hard-earned truth, and it can be discomforting to think that His presence is at its most resonant in life’s darkest and cruellest moments.

Understandably, you feel heartbroken about the world—it can feel like a ruthless place, vindictive, and sometimes it seems personal. But I have realised that it is a moral error to compulsively fixate on the world’s troubles, to elevate ‘the crack in everything’ and not acknowledge ‘the light getting in.’ Our pleasures and joys are not a negation of humanity’s suffering, a betrayal of those we have lost, or the denial of our various griefs. They are the bright, necessary, God-filled articulations of our humanness. We humans are our own howling voids—cracked and beautiful things pierced by light.

I think Cave offers an important word to a world that often seems addicted to unhappiness, incapable of seeing goodness, somehow imagining our sadness and rage and anxiety to be evidence of our moral depth and seriousness. It is a moral error to compulsively fixate on the world’s troubles. And, conversely, it may just be a moral obligation to attend to where the light gets in. For it does get in. It always has and it always will.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5).