Beautiful Ache

Dear friends, I’m taking a pause on my horror shorts series to write a couple of posts which have been thoughts brewing (in the best way).

This week I was speaking with Rebekah Anne Perkins on her podcast about the way Christians can find comfort in the midst of suffering, especially if we’re willing to embrace the experience and not shrink back from it. I’ve wrestled with this on a personal level for many years, and it was refreshing to talk to someone who also has trodden a thorny path and found sweet water by the wayside.

No sane person argues that pain feels good. Or that hardship is something they can’t wait to find. The best way to describe suffering is as a shadow of death, a promise of the finality of loss which comes for all of us in the end. Even dropping your ice cream on the sidewalk without being able to taste more than a bite is a faint echo of death’s call. From small to grave, our hurts hint at our dying.

Death is the deepest wrong, the most incurable wound, our world knows. Wherever we look, we see life. We open our eyes in the morning and see sunlight streaming into our bedroom; stepping from the car to the office we hear a faint trill of birdsong; going to lunch with a friend we are surrounded by people who have parents, siblings, children, friends, and lovers waiting to see them again; when we lie down again at night we become aware of the slow moving of breath in our lungs, the beat of our heart, and the annoying activity of our brain as we seek to fall asleep. It’s life, every bit of it. And the very existence of death—of bringing any piece of that beauty to an end—is a wrong we feel in our bones.

So how could someone stand up and say that suffering, the presage of death, is beautiful?

I hardly know how to explain it. But I’ve experienced it. Rebekah and I touched on it glancingly in our conversation on the podcast. I’ve spoken with friends about my experiences and thoughts, and words always stumble out of my mouth awkwardly. Yet despite the incredible nuance of this topic and my own incapability to really explain it, I still want to explore it with you.

I truly believe there is beauty we discover in the midst of our suffering. Not in the pain itself, but in pain’s voice. Like an oracle, pain speaks in riddles, but the answer lies in what we make of the message. I’m talking metaphysics, here. If there exist such virtues as Peace and Charity, could we not allow a seat for Sorrow?

I picture a circular room with many thrones on which are seated Wisdom, Justice, Faith, Hope, Love, Moderation, and Courage, among others. When a person endures hardship, especially over decades, they do not walk alone for long. Standing on either side of them are Sorrow and Beauty, offering their support and taking the sufferer by the hands. The fruit of their companionship is the birth of something new within the sufferer—Longing.

Because when we know how quickly beauty fades and is replaced by decay, our heart yearns for more than the mere taste we are afforded in this life. When we see how deeply our suffering digs into our very nature, and what raw materials it reveals—whether virtue or evil—a quiet humility or a silent rage will settle inside our hearts. For good or ill, suffering creates a longing within us which cannot be sated.

This is what I think of as the “beautiful ache” which draws me beyond myself and the small matters of my life. It is what C.S. Lewis described. “There arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss” (Surprised by Joy).

To experience this longing, is to feel so alive, so large, so stretched (beyond time itself) that the thought of our existence being snuffed out is laughable. We have grown too alive for death. It can touch us, certainly, but its touch only stirs up more of this longing which is a passionate love of life and an unquenchable thirst for beauty. We rage against the darkness and dare it to make its final stand. We are an eternal.

However grand this sounds, it would be a rather empty way to live, without a definite hope for satisfaction. Without having a resting place to seek out, longing is only a black hole which will suck at us and those around us without mercy. We become no better than the death we hate. But longing which has a home to seek, a satisfaction to hope for, is a life-giving, celebratory revel. We dance through life in concentric circles, drawing ever closer to the destination we’ve been seeking. Our good rest.

My faith has always been to me farsight. There is never an experience in life which doesn’t echo back from an eternal reality, for me. Sunlight is all the sweeter because I am aware that the deadly star-power of a burning gas giant is gently warming my face, after passing through a vast amount of space and several protective layers of magnetic energy surrounding planet Earth to reach me. When we look for it, beauty is waiting to be discovered everywhere, in every living thing, but especially in people. And sorrow is stirred up, especially in our relationships, because we can’t help hurting one another. It’s like we’re living out an open invitation to seek something more. To long—with a beautiful, sad ache—for a perfect country.