Chapter 4
Weeping Lovers
Weeping Lovers
In a class lecture about Christian compassion, Calvin Miller once pronounced that “We all die either bitter cynics or weeping lovers.” After pausing for effect, he then adjured us: “Be a weeping lover.” To further explain, Miller, with watery eyes, urged us: “Let humanity’s hurt move you to tears so that you react with mercy and kindness rather than judgment and complaint.” In addition to such tweet–worthy lines, Miller also had a penchant for quoting from tragic Russian novels. Perhaps, then, when Miller pleaded with us to “be a weeping lover,” he had in mind a character like Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. In the book, Myshkin represents the ideal Christ–like person whom the other characters in the story consider an “idiot” because of how he navigates through a society gaudily marked by power, wealth, and sex. The most powerful part of the novel is when the prince recounts how he pretended to be hoodwinked by a drunk. Reliving the encounter, the prince tells his soon to be betrayer,
And this morning a drunken soldier tried to sell me a silver cross
and I could see that it was made of tin.
And when I bought it from him for twenty kopeks,
I could see how pleased he was that he cheated me as he went out to
drink the value of the cross. I walked away thinking, “I must not be
too quick to condemn a man who sold his Christ. Only God knows
what’s locked away in these weak and broken hearts.”
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, 174–75)
This and the events following it made such a tremendous impression upon Myshkin that he goes on to conclude with what may be the most important line from the book: “Compassion is the chief law of human existence” (Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, 182). With this axiom, Dostoyevsky seems to depict his “idiot” as crystalizing something the “sane” are prone to forget. That is, because we are a broken people in a broken world with other broken people, our very existence, our fundamental law, calls us to walk in compassion.
Broken
My wife and I served as therapeutic foster parents for children who have had unspeakable things done to them, often by the very people who were supposed to love and protect them the most. As a result, these children carry trauma with them that causes them to do unimaginable things that could in their own right be featured in a tragic Russian novel. For instance, a few years ago our twelve–year–old foster daughter would sneak out of bed, gather her clean clothes, and put them in a laundry basket. Then she would defecate on them. Every morning we would wake up to an ungodly odor coming from her room—which, despite our herculean efforts, we could not get rid of. It turned out, in addition to the clothes in a basket, she had hidden towels around the room covered in her filth. When we asked her why she kept doing this, she sincerely confessed: “I don’t know. I’m just broken I guess.”
When Jesus looked upon the crowds in Matthew, he saw humanity’s sullied garments and our hidden towels. He recognized our unceasing tendency to self–sabotage and to “k–word” all over ourselves. To borrow from Prince Myshkin, Christ knew what’s locked away in our weak and fractured hearts. Yet, instead of reacting with deserved disgust, Jesus responded and continues to respond with unceasing compassion: thereby proving that God loves us and there’s nothing we can do about it. The sole law of human existence, therefore, seems to be part of the divine economy as well. The latter, no doubt, precedes the former.
Consequently, we too should reflect God’s compassion, smell of his mercy, and imitate his Son. But while compassion is often sought in our world today, it is rarely found—even among God’s people. In one of Yeats’s most famous poems, “The Second Coming,” he underscores the chaos, confusion, and pain that brands humanity. Yeats writes:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood–dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Considering our topic, perhaps we should tweak the poet’s wording a bit. Maybe just as relevant as how the best lack all conviction might be that the best lack all compassion. Perhaps this too is why things are falling apart and the center cannot hold. While the world no longer feigns even to blush, we bitter cynics hardly shed a tear as we watch how the blood–dimmed tide is loosed and the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
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