Love Not in Vain: The Open Secret

Well, I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome
and I could not help but cry
All my love's in vain

—Robert Johnson

All the way to heaven is heaven.

—St. Catherine of Siena

Since watching Bergman’s Winter Light recently, I’ve been haunted by a scene in which a woman begs to be given a purpose for her life. Though she doesn’t believe in God, she has nevertheless prayed for a purpose, and believes at first that her prayer has been answered when she concludes that her purpose will be to care for the man she loves. Her lover, a Lutheran minister, has lost his own faith and seems to have lost with it the capacity for love or even sympathy: he rejects her brutally, throwing her into anguish from which she cries out that she is strong and willing to give and to suffer but that she must have a purpose for doing so. Without an object for her love, a purpose for it, it seems in vain.

It’s this continual probing of God even by those who can no longer believe in him that makes Bergman’s films on this subject so profound. The need for purpose is very close to the core of the human soul. If the materialists are right and neither the cosmos in general nor human life in particular have any purpose, then our need for it is a pretty odd phenomenon. We’re pretty inventive in coming up with explanations for everything we see as well as for our own existence, and an explanation, even a materialistic one, is an exercise in the discovery of short-range purpose (“the male robin’s breast is red in order to attract the female…” etc.).

It’s been said that Christianity is a key which matches precisely the intricate lock which is every human heart, and this is nowhere more evident than in this question of purpose. Christianity is certainly not the only religion or the only “belief system” which can give purpose to one’s life, and the provision of such a purpose says nothing about whether the beliefs are true; in fact the evidence indicates that some of those whose sense of purpose is most intense are most deluded. But the purpose of human life—human life in general and in particular, that of every one who has ever lived as well as yours and mine—as understood in Christianity is more closely fitted to the deepest needs of the soul than those proposed by any other system (or so it seems to me—I can’t claim to have examined every system closely).

We are told that one who lives an evil life can repent and reach the same heaven as Mother Teresa. And current articulations of Catholic teaching hold that those who do not directly know or confess Christ may be saved as a result of their desire to live rightly. So we sometimes hear a question that goes something like this: Why bother to live as a Christian at all? Why go to all that bother of going to church and praying and constraining your appetites when everyone except the worst of monsters will probably be saved anyway?

Well, obviously there are several theological mistakes implied in that last question, but I’m going to let those go and answer it as stated: you will be, or at least can and should be, happier in this life if you are a Christian than if you are not. I’m not talking about some sort of prosperity gospel which promises, falsely, that Christians will live in material comfort and be free from trouble. In fact you should not expect, as a Christian, to be any more free from external difficulty than anyone else, and perhaps less so. But everything you do will be richer in meaning than it could be otherwise, and therefore you will be happier, because we are all like that woman in Winter Light, and must have a purpose.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

—Matthew 11:28-30

Here is the open secret of Christianity, the thing that was spoken plainly to the whole world by the Lord himself, but can only be understood by those who have accepted the invitation. The yoke and the burden may in fact be intensely painful in some ways. Certainly the early Christians found them to be so, and it may still be so for us. But when you take them up and start walking with them, you find that though they may bear the body down they defy gravity in the spiritual realm, and lift the soul.

Life itself is almost certain to be intensely painful at some point to everyone. Some amount of suffering will come to all of us, and much to some. But God has given us what may be the greatest gift possible in this life: a meaning for suffering. And not only a meaning, but the choice of making our suffering a positive good by actively offering it on behalf of others. We not only have a purpose for our own lives, but we can choose to make that purpose be the one which is universally acknowledged to be the highest: to give our own lives for the sake of others. And—here’s the best part—we are promised that our efforts will have an effect.

Here’s a little thought experiment: suppose you are standing by an icy river. A gang of thugs comes along and, out of sheer meanness, pushes you in. You are almost stunned by the shock of the cold, and the bank is too steep and slippery for you to climb out. You reach for a branch hanging near the water but you’re too heavy for it and it breaks. You have only minutes to live and will spend them thrashing around wildly in panic, succumbing slowly to hypothermia and/or drowning.

Now suppose you’re standing by that same river, and you see a drowning child. You jump in. You are almost stunned by the shock of the cold, but you reach the child and try to bring him back to the shore. You see that you will never be able to climb the steep and slippery bank, but there is a low-hanging branch which the child is able to grasp, and he pulls himself out of the water. As you are succumbing slowly to hypothermia and/or drowning, you see someone helping the child to safety.

One way or another, sooner or later, we’re all going into that river, and we’re not coming out alive. Would you rather be thrown in, or jump in of your own free will to save somebody else? Which way would you prefer to die?

The secret of Christianity, which is also broadcast news, is that you can make any suffering that comes your way, from the least inconvenience to the worst agony, into a likeness of the second rather than the first scenario. We can take fear and suffering and death, the most terrible facts of human life, the facts which in every other religion must simply be endured, and make of them an instrument of love which will not be in vain.