Your emotions are gifts from God: they don't make life easy, but they do make life meaningful

[The Great Open Dance]

The play of contrasts generates meaning. In the Genesis narrative, Eve and Adam are expelled from Eden. But nowhere does the Bible suggest that our salvation lies in a return to Eden. The biblical narrative begins in a garden (Eden, in Genesis) but ends in a city (the New Jerusalem, in Revelation). We cannot become innocents again. We cannot go back.

Our eventual wholeness must place us beyond our starting point, beyond naivete. Just as no child in the womb can anticipate what life will be like outside the womb, Adam and Eve could not anticipate what life would be like outside Eden. In all probability, they feared the agony but could not anticipate the ecstasy.

God places us within the play of contrasts, such as agony and ecstasy, to grant us significance. We live in a world of joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, activity and exhaustion, all of which conspire for our benefit. Beings and events reveal their fullness only in relation to their opposite which, through its opposition, brings them to completion. Hence, they are not opposites; they are mutually amplifying contrasts. The gnostic Gospel of Philip declares: “Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are siblings of one another. They are inseparable.”

The Gospel asserts that reality, like God, is dialectical—giving, receiving, changing, growing. Therefore, we should be unsurprised by our own movement through contrasts. God creates both the light and the darkness (Genesis 1:1–5), that the light might shine in the darkness (John 1:5), because there it shines most brightly. Thus, the meeting places of contrasts are not borders; they are areas of exchange. Each contrast flows into and out of the other, heightening one another’s being.

Participation in this process of openness and exchange makes us larger, freer, and more compassionate, but compassion is not easy. At some point, exhausted by the flux of life and doubtful of the good God, we will all join in Job’s lament: “Who continues to bruise someone when they’re broken and screaming for help? In the past didn’t I weep for the troubled? Didn’t I grieve for the oppressed? But when I expected good, evil came; when I waited for the light, darkness came” (Job 30:24–26).

Love in a dangerous universe requires courage. To be in deep relationship with someone is to be vulnerable, not just to that person, but to all that might happen to them. For this reason, many retreat from dangerous relation into safer isolation, where the sufferings of others cannot reach them. Such isolation need not be social; it may very well be emotional and moral, but it always protects us from enduring another’s pain.

Given the safety of isolation, why counsel compassion in a suffering world? Prudence suggests that compassion is too costly. But mysteriously, compassion grants us more joy, more hope, and more peace. These blessings seem to arise from relationality itself, from our human love which serves as a conduit of divine love. Compared with the safety of isolation, the risk of love now seems alive.

I myself have resisted love. When our first child, Josiah, was born, it was a thrill to watch him develop. His first smile, his first giggle, his lurching attempts to crawl, his drunken stumbling as he learned how to walk, the music as he exclaimed “Dada!” or “Mama!” were all gifts. Yet what I found was that, as Josiah grew, I began to love him more than I had anticipated. I began to experience a terrifying tenderness, and that scared me, because Josiah is mortal. I had no God-given assurance that everything in my life and in my children’s lives would pan out the way I wanted it to. As my love for Josiah grew, my fear grew along with it. What if something went wrong? What if there was a car accident?

We mute the song of the universe with fearful, cautious earplugs. We must risk grief to become alive.

My own advocacy of relationality and vulnerability rightfully opens me to criticisms of socioeconomic privilege. My own vulnerability is much less dangerous than the vulnerability of workers in the developing world, women in misogynistic societies, sexual minorities under fundamentalist regimes, and ethnic minorities under nationalist governments. It might be arrogant to prescribe vulnerability from my safe suburban home.

To address this legitimate concern, I will turn to the assistance of Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a novel about American Blacks living during the time of slavery. As such, it grants us a literary example of human openness under conditions of horrific suffering. In the novel, two characters disagree about the extent to which a human being should love in a racist, violent world. The maternal character, Sethe, is willing to risk love, while her lover, Paul D, recoils from such vulnerability: “Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.”

Paul D, understandably, wants to protect his self from the cruelties of White enslavers. To protect his self, he must not love too much. The invulnerability that he pursues leaves him with enough self to survive loss, even the horrible losses experienced by Blacks in mid-nineteenth-century America.

But Sethe disagrees; she must love: “That’s the way it is, Paul D. I can’t explain it to you no better than that, but that’s the way it is. If I have to choose—well, it’s not even a choice.” Why would Sethe, placed in a horribly dangerous situation, assent to love others who are subject to the very same danger? Because she has discovered that love cannot be separated from life without loss of life. In Sethe’s condition, her only power is the superabundant love that prudence demands she resist. She realizes that this love, in this situation, will necessitate her suffering. Yet she chooses it as an expression of her passion for life. The enslavers may steal her body, her sex, and her labor, and they may try to steal her children, but they cannot steal her love.

Sethe exemplifies the dangerous love that lies at the heart of God. If God is three persons united into one community through love, if God is Trinity, then vulnerability belongs to God. Therefore, God cannot be apathetic, unfeeling, or unchanging. Instead, God is passionate and emotional. To correct millennia of theological discourse about the unfeeling God, we now need theology that extols the openness of God to the world in all its glory and suffering. God no longer transcends human emotionality. Instead, God is the depth and source of human emotionality. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 185-188)

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For further reading, please see:

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2016.

Isenberg, Wesley W., translator. “Gospel of Philip.” In The Nag Hammadi Library in English, edited by James M. Robinson, 131–51. New York, Harper & Row, 1977.

Kasher, Asa and Diller, Jeanine. Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin, 1998.