3. Too much pain
When hope disappeared on me, I worried that friends might disappear, too. Would the new me, empty of hope, be too scary for them? Would no one want to know me? Would I end up alone?
Not idle questions. When I was a believer, I wanted only the company of other believers. I was pushing hope hard, right up to the breaking point. I needed bolstering. So if you were someone who had doubts about hope, I couldn’t risk being around you. And if you were a nonbeliever, I didn’t want to know you existed.
Now I’m on the other side of that divide and I can tell you that when you cross over to the far side of hope, it’s quite possible you will lose people, people who sincerely care about you but can’t handle your unbelief.
I wish this weren’t so. We humans are so good at making divisions between you and me and us and them—over politics, religion, sports, so many things—we can do that, too, with the issue of hope, making hurtful divisions between believers and nonbelievers. But I want there to be mixed-hope friendships and relationships. I want that to be unremarkable.
The death of hope is not the point of this book. It’s only the inciting incident. My mission is to show how putting fight into the heart of our love keeps despair at bay so we can make a vigorous, sustaining post-hope life for ourselves and our loved ones.
And I want to show that even though believers and nonbelievers have very different ways of refusing despair, we can find common ground in the simple fact of our refusal.
In my activist days, people who were “in denial” drove me to distraction. Maybe once in a while they’d dip their oar in to help, but they never got deeply engaged in the work of salvation, not like we needed. It didn’t matter how much we preached or begged, they turned away, retreating into their own safely-bounded world of work and family.
We tried our best guilt-tripping: “Wake up! Join us! If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, and right now you’re part of the problem.” But this mostly made them want to retreat even more, which only confirmed for us the uselessness of such people and justified our disgust.
Now I see it differently. There are many people in denial who aren’t so much denying as refusing. They refuse to call the question of hope, and for good reason. They know if they call that question, if they look at it closely, if they think about it deeply, the answer they’ll get back will be so bad they won’t know what to do with it. They know if they lift the veil they will not find salvation but damnation. So they try not to think about hope one way or the other. There’s a part of them that actually does know how bad things are, and being that much in touch makes them want to be out of touch.
I think this is often true for parents. When I’ve explained what I’m writing, I’ve heard parents say, “Oh. I’m sorry, I won’t be able to read your book because I have children.” And I get that. If I had children I don’t know that I’d be writing this.
When I turned twenty-nine, I made the decision not to have kids because I knew I was not ready to be the kind of father I would need to be in order to feel good about being a father. So I got myself a vasectomy. I was a lost person in those days, but I had just enough insight into myself to know it was going to be quite a long time before I’d be ready to be a parent. Too long. My estimate was twenty years, which turned out to be accurate, a bit optimistic, but close enough. I sometimes joke that displayed on top of my bookshelf I’ve got three thank you cards from the kids I didn’t have. And, really, I can’t begin to tell you how grateful they are that they didn’t have to grow up with me for a dad.
If I had it to do over, I’d still make that same decision, but now it would be for a different reason. There’s no way I could bring kids into this world to face the future I see coming. Of all the things I’m thankful for, I’m most thankful that I’ve spared three little children that fate. I believe not having kids is the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.
A single mom once told me, “It’s all I can do to work and raise my daughter. Sometimes I do a little volunteering with the homeless through my church. But that’s all I can handle. I don’t dare look at the big picture, because if I did I would be crying all the time.”
In California where I live, you can find dozens of self-help gurus who with the least bit of encouragement will be glad to advise you how to run your life: “Stop being so closed. Drop your defenses. Open up. Let it all in.” I’ve been given that advice more than once myself, and I’ve certainly had to learn a lot about vulnerability to make my life work, so I know the value of opening up. But I don’t believe in letting it all in. That’s because the truth can be traumatic. We like to speak of truth as though it were always a virtue, always a help, but if it’s too raw or if you get too much of it at once, it can hurt you.
I remember in the 70s and 80s it seemed like a good thing for people who had suffered sexual abuse during childhood to go back into past traumas during their therapy sessions and relive those memories all over again. That was supposed to be healing. But we know better now. Too much reliving is retraumatizing.
These days a therapist who understands this will tell her client, “You don’t have to remember everything. You don’t have to feel everything. The point is to create a life for yourself now and in the future. The point is to get free. This means that when you’re blocked by something from childhood, we’ll make a trip into your past, but we’ll only go back to get that one thing you need so you can move forward.”
So perhaps a woman goes back just long enough to find the evidence that allows her to say: “I see it now. In the beginning I did try to stop the assaults. I pushed my father away. I told him this was wrong. I told him God didn’t want him to touch me like this. He forced me and I couldn’t stop him, but now, in this moment, I can see I was not a willing victim. I was a protestor. At age seven, I was so scared and I was a protestor.”
In this world of ours, there can be too much pain. James Herriott, in his sweet stories about his years as a veterinarian in Yorkshire, says cows can take just about anything, but horses can’t stand much. We’re like horses, we can’t stand much. It doesn’t take much to hurt our feelings or shut us down or do us lasting harm.
We like to brag about how tough we are. After all, we humans have clawed our way to the top. We rule the world. But as tough as we are, we’re even more vulnerable than we are tough. We’re actually a supersensitive species. That’s one of the keys to our triumph. We’re an intensely social species so we constantly have to feel out the nuances of where we stand with those around us. We need to know who’s with us and who’s against us and who’s in the process of shifting their allegiance in one direction or the other.
Our supersensitivity needs denial as its partner. When our sensitivity becomes too painful, denial comes to our aid. Then it’s a godsend. And so it does not deserve a blanket condemnation. And that’s especially true in our current period of history when reality has become magnificently painful.
As a child in church, I heard the story of the Crucifixion every year during the week before Easter. Our minister said Christ took the sins of the world upon himself and then he died. More than the nails through his hands or hanging on the cross all day, more than the spear in his side, it was that unimaginable burden of sin that killed him. But in my child’s mind I translated sin into pain. I imagined that Christ, because of his big heart, took the full weight of the pain of all the people in the world—past, present, and future—upon himself, and that crushed him.
There are days when just living my own life is more than enough for me. And if, on top of that, two or three people I know are in trouble at the same time—a divorce, the death of a parent, a miscarriage—it’s too big a challenge to be with that much suffering all at once. I mean really be with it, not just know about it, but experience empathic pain with the people going through it, not just do problem solving or rescuing, which was my old habit, but really be with them in deep companionship.
And I think about how much pain there can be in the lives of the people living on just one city block or in one small town. And then I try to imagine really being with the pain of all seven billion of us facing our death as a species, and I can’t. I can’t imagine carrying the burden of that infinity. I don’t know what I’d do without denial, because the state of the world is too much to bear. Yes, some people can tolerate more truth than others. But the differences between our individual capacities are so very small compared to the total amount of pain there is in the world. If anyone were able to let it all in all at once, I think it would be like my childhood understanding of the Crucifixion, it would be crushing.
And so, because even the most open among us can only handle a few drops of the entire sea of human suffering, we have to focus on what we can handle. It’s like with attention. We attend to only a very few things in our visual field. Most of what’s going on around us at any one time, we block out. We have to. There are just too many things going on. We couldn’t possibly focus on all those details at once. We’d be so busy looking at everything that we’d miss the important thing. We’d be crossing the street so lost in the kaleidoscope of people, store windows, deli smells, and neon colors that we’d miss the distracted driver on his cell phone coming right at us way too fast. Without focused attention, we could not live. And without denial, we could not live.
Which brings me to the Goldilocks dilemma. I don’t want to push people to open to more reality than they can manage. When I was an activist, I was polite and shy on the surface, but underneath I was impatient and demanding. I was desperate to make people pay attention. I was righteously urgent about saving the world, so I considered whatever measures I had to take in service of that purpose, whatever pain I had to cause, to be justified.
But I don’t care to push people anymore. First, I believe it’s too late to save ourselves so why push people over the edge for nothing? More importantly, though, before I started pushing someone now, I would want to know what it took to break them, and I would not want to break them.
The Goldilocks approach appeals to me. I want people to have the dose of reality that’s not too much and not too little, but just right. Just right for growing them and moving them the next step forward. I think this is the compassionate way to do activism. But the problem with this strategy is that we don’t have that kind of time. We humans, as a group, cannot grow fast enough to handle reality in the way we’d need to handle it if we were actually going to save ourselves.
This is why, in the end, I come down on the side of denial. We have an absolutely urgent need for everyone to see the whole truth, right now, and then take action. I get that. Yet I consider people who refuse to call the question of hope to be kindred spirits. I’d much rather they refuse despair, whatever that takes, than drown in it.
