“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret…”
– John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Just a brief glance at the headlines these days can find us overwhelmed by phantasms of calamity. Plagues and disasters seem to lurk around every corner. We are accosted by bad news and fear-mongering 24/7 online and elsewhere. Obviously, going ape over every possible hazard, real or imagined, just isn’t the wisest course in life for any of us.
Certainly, we can’t yield to blind optimism either. Some measure of vigilance is always necessary in life. Voltaire said it best in “Candide”:
“‘What’s optimism?’ asked Cacambo. ‘I’m afraid to say,’ said Candide, ‘that it’s a mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.”
Faith affords us a very different kind of optimism than the one Voltaire mocks and derides. It’s grounded in the fundamental notion that hardships will befall all of us in some capacity, but that we are more than capable to rise to the occasion in service to others and ourselves with God at our side.
In fact, it may be that the hardships that fall upon our shoulders are the very things that mold and shape us into who we ought to be. Often it’s the challenges we don’t want to face that force us to grow in spite of ourselves.
We are not afforded visions or foresight into our future. Instead, God tasks us with the profound and simple command to trust Him because ultimately, all is well and as it should be – as inscrutable as that may seem at times. Of course, such trust in God is no easy feat. Just ask Job.
Here was a righteous man of God beset by a harrowing series of afflictions in his life. Loss of family, loss of wealth, and disease all assailed Job in unimaginable ways.
Though Job may have questioned his own existence at times in his anguish, he never abandoned his belief in God throughout the entirety of his trials and tribulations. Trust in God is how Job finally defeated the Devil’s most powerful tool: Despair.
Rabbi Harold Kushner offers good insight on Job in his book, “The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened To A Good Person”:
It is to this dimension of God, a God who cannot tolerate the reduction of a human being, fashioned in His image, to less than human status, that Job may be appealing. Job, in his extremity, is calling on God, saying, “I have no one left. I am without family. My friends have deserted me. You who are the Father of all humanity…”
In more recent times, one can draw from Viktor Frankl and his harrowing account of the Holocaust in his seminal work, “Man’s Search For Meaning”:
Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths…The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.
In spite of such horrors, Frankl emphasizes again and again just how integral faith was for survival in concentration camps:
…I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost…It is this spiritual freedom – which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
The world will always remain in a state of flux. Calamities great and small will befall all of us. Faith in God, however, remains our greatest antidote in such times. Our greatest strength as Americans and as people of faith is that we rise to any occasion and never succumb to it.