2. Fierceness and Tenderness
2
Fierceness and Tenderness
There is an answer, I believe, to the question asked at the end of the first chapter. But first we need to go back to the beginnings of things.
Paul Tillich, in The Eternal Now, writes,
Being alive means being in a body—a body separated from all other bodies. And being separated means being alone. This is true of every creature, and it is more true of man than of any other creature. He is not only alone; he also knows that he is alone. . . . This aloneness he cannot endure. Neither can he escape it. It is his destiny to be alone and to be aware of it. Not even God can take this destiny away from him.1
When God created the world, He saw each thing that He made as good. But when He made man, He saw that it was not good that man should be alone. Man is a social creature like the animals. They move in pairs or flocks or herds. God designed the answer to Adam’s aloneness: a woman. They were a couple, meant to answer to each other.
Each, however, was still alone in a profound sense—in a separate body, alone before God, bearing His image, answering to Him, responsible. This aloneness was a good thing, for everything in the Garden was perfect.
But something happened. Sin destroyed the perfect harmony of the universe. The relationship of man with God and of human beings with each other was fractured. Man now knows that he is alone. His aloneness is no longer an experience only of solitude (not by any means a bad thing in itself) but also of deprivation. The human companionship, which in the divine plan was the answer to man’s aloneness, no longer suffices. Disobedience ruined it. His aloneness has another dimension which is an experience of pain—a pain called loneliness. This kind of pain is a part of what philosophers term “the human predicament,” the character, status, or condition of humanity. No one ever escapes it.
Most of us, I suppose, have sensed our solitude especially poignantly on occasions when we have stood before the grandeur of nature—a roaring thunderstorm, a spangled midnight sky, a crashing sea. It can be comforting or it can be terrifying, depending on our relationship with the One who brought it all into being, or perhaps merely on the mood of the moment.
It is a terrible thing—and only if one were subhuman and brutish could it fail to be terrifying—to have no roots in this world, to be homeless, isolated, an “unplaced person,” to be on the earth but not of it. What in the Old Testament figure of Melchizedek—“without father, without mother, without genealogy”—is mystery, for us would be tragedy. Without family or friends or foothold in the earth, without sun and stars and winds, we should be only half alive, doomed to at best a twilight existence; to be fully alive is to be in some way part of these things—and of their fierceness as of their tenderness.2
So writes Gerald Vann in The Son’s Course. He has put his finger on the cause of greatest human desolation. We must have a foothold.
The world offers its poor anodynes and they are eagerly seized—“I might find the answer in the singles bar, the Personals column, the Meet Market.” It is true indeed that the lonely might find a mate, someone willing to have a go at loving them, at least for a night, but is this really the answer they seek? Without a foothold, without an awareness of being a part of something grander and greater than themselves, it will not be enough.
It was the Love of God that brought us all into being—sun, stars, winds, men and women, and “infants to sweeten the world” (to use a phrase from an old prayer which I love). To know God, or even to begin to know Him, is to know that we are not alone in the universe. Someone else is out there. There is a hint that there may be a refuge for our loneliness. To stop our frantic getting, spending, and searching, and simply to look at the things God has made is to move one step away from despair. For God cares. The most awesome seascape can reveal a care which is actually tender.
“Who watched over the birth of the sea, when it burst in flood from the womb?” God asked Job in the midst of his great suffering, “when I wrapped it in a blanket of cloud and cradled it in fog?” (Job 38:8–9 NEB). A God who can look on the mighty ocean as a tiny newborn—could He overlook one of His lonely people? Job had felt very much overlooked. Yet, after all his questions and accusations, he was shown that not for a moment had he really been forgotten.
“Do you . . . attend the wild doe when she is in labor? Do you count the months that they carry their young or know the time of their delivery, when they crouch down to open their wombs?” (Job 39:1–3 NEB). If God sees the doe in the throes of her agony and attends the delivery of her fawn in the forest, we may believe that an aching heart does not escape His notice.
To my father I owe a deep consciousness of God as Creator. I cannot remember a time when I was not aware of the songs of birds, the glory of mountains, the freshness of the dawn, the deep sweetness of a forest of white pines, the mystery of the night sky. He taught us to see, hear, smell, feel, taste. Both parents taught us in a thousand ways to know the One who made us all, and to trust Him. And they told us the story which, far more than all the glories of nature, opens the heart of God—the story of the One “who is the effulgence of God’s splendour and the stamp of God’s very being” (Heb. 1:3 NEB), the story of Jesus, His birth to a virgin-mother, His life, His death on the Cross. When we were very small they taught us to trust Him; they sang to us at bedtime, “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” That’s where we grew up.
But safety, as the Cross shows, does not exclude suffering. All that was of course beyond me when I was a child, but as I began to learn about suffering I learned that trust in those strong arms means that even our suffering is under control. We are not doomed to meaninglessness. A loving Purpose is behind it all, a great tenderness even in the fierceness.