I awoke this morning from a frightening and sad dream. And I was struck how instantly I tried to rush from the sadness to happiness, to reassure myself that "all's right in the world ... It was just a dream". Why did I do that?
1. The precursor to the human smile was the caveman's grimace. The invention of dentistry is the main difference between this threatening grimace and the polite social convention of the modern smile.
2. In the Protestant West today, smiling has become a moral imperative. The smile is regarded as the objective externalisation of a well ordered life. Sadness is moral failure.
3. The motif of late-capitalist society is the stylization of happiness, the cultivation of lifestyles from which every trace of sadness has been expunged. Peter Berger identified "the Protestant smile" as part of Protestantism's cultural heritage in the West. In a Catholic country like France, it's still considered crass to smile too often, or at strangers. Evangelical churchliness is the ritualization of bare-toothed crassness. Our cultural obsession with health, happiness, and positive thinking is a secularization of the evangelical church service.
4. The cultural triumph of the smile leaves behind a trail of casualties. Where evangelical churches theologize happiness and ritualize the smile, sad believers are spiritually ostracised. Sadness is the scarlet letter of the contemporary church, embroidered proof of a person's spiritual failure.
5. When the church's wrong-headed theological rejection of sadness was secularized, sadness became a pathology requiring medical intervention. The medicalization of sadness is the final cultural triumph of the Protestant smile. If Luther or Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky had lived today, we would have given them Prozac and schooled them in positive thinking. They would have grinned abortively -- and written nothing. The truth of sadness is the womb of thought.
6. Somehow the appellation "man of sorrows" attached itself to the church's memory of Jesus -- quite rightly so, given how often Jesus wept in the narratives. The sinless humanity of the Son of God was manifest not in happiness or success but in a life of sadness and affliction. Erasing sadness from our culture, we also rewrite those stories about Christ. And that's why we never see him in our world today.
Looking for Jesus in the world takes eyes often filled with tears.
7. I knew a little boy whose grandmother had to go away for a few days. When she came home, he cried and told her he had missed her. Touched by his infant sadness, the grandmother said, "It's nice to be missed" -- and he replied, "It's not nice to miss". It is nice to be missed because we learn what love means in the sadness of another. The face that always smiles is the face of a stranger. Love is written on the face of sadness.
I'm convinced this is why our culture is more and very jaded when it comes to love. We cannot be sad, hence we cannot love.
8. I once knew a fellow being interviewed for ordination. Asked to describe his hope for the church's future, his eyes filled with tears and he admitted, "I don't know if I have any hope for the church". Perplexed by this response, his ecclesiastical interviewers furrowed their brows, scribbled little notes and question-marks, conferred gravely about his fitness for ministry -- though they ought to have asked for his prayers, or poured oil on his head, or sat at his feet and made him their bishop.
9. Where sadness is expunged from our culture, the cry for justice falls silent. And again, hearts grow cold.
Johnny Cash carried darkness on his back, refusing to wear bright clothes as long as the world is unredeemed. Why do we dress our priests in black? Are they not in perpetual mourning for a world that is passing away? Is not Christian joy carried out in the shadow of this sadness? In a culture of happiness, it's all the more necessary that our priests continue to wear black, refusing the cheap comfort of bright vestments and the empty promise of the rainbow.
10. At the hinge of the millennium, JG Ballard wondered how the next generation would perceive the 20th century: "My grandchildren are all under the age of four, the first generation who will have no memories of the present century, and are likely to be appalled when they learn what was allowed to take place. For them, our debased entertainment culture and package-tour hedonism will be inextricably linked to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, though we would never make the connection". How do we explain the fact that Auschwitz and Hiroshima are immediately succeeded by the cult of happiness and the triumph of the smile? How can it be that the worst century was also the happiest? Our children will interpret our happiness as blindness and self-forgetfulness. We have drugged ourselves against history; sadness is truthful memory.
Only those who weep in history can be prepared for the Kingdom of God.
11. Why are clowns so frightening? Their demonic aura comes from the fact that they never stop smiling. Hell is the great Country of Clowns, where tormented strangers smile at one another compulsively and forever. The devil is the name we give to the Cheshire Cat that is always vanishing just beneath the surface of our world, leaving everywhere sinister traces of a cosmic painted grin. This grin is the secret of history.
Steven King's It is precisely freighting for just this reason.
12. The Bible promises the end of history and the end of sadness: "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away" (Rev 21.4). This can be understood as eschatological promise only on the presumption that history is catastrophe, a vale of tears. Sadness is overcome through cosmic redemption. A culture without sadness is a culture without hope. The cure for sadness is God, not a pill. And certainly not a smile.