Part of the Deal
A Sermon Preached by the Revd Canon Dr Alison Joyce on the Feast of Candlemas, 31st January 2010
Some of you, I’m sure, will have seen the 1993 film, Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins. It is a movie based on a true story: the story of the relationship between C.S. Lewis, most famous as the author of the Narnia books, and his wife, Joy Davidman.
They were by all accounts a most unlikely couple. When they first met, Lewis was a confirmed bachelor; a somewhat desiccated and emotionally-repressed Oxford don, aged in his fifties; Joy was a forthright Jewish-American divorcee with two young sons. And yet, they fell deeply in love. Sadly their relationship was marked by tragedy: by the time that their register office married was blessed, in a short ceremony in the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, they already knew that she was dying of cancer.
The film, Shadowlands, charts all of this with great poignancy. But there is one particular scene within it that I would like to describe to you this morning. After their marriage, during a period of remission in Joy’s illness, the two of them are show having a wonderful few days away together in a country hotel, enjoying one another’s company as never before, in glorious weather surrounded by breathtaking scenery. All of which culminates in a moment of pure happiness, which Lewis says he wishes he could capture forever. But that is also the moment when Joy needs him to be able to talk with her about what lies before them: her inevitable death. And looking ahead to that inescapable event, she says this:
“The pain then is part of the happiness now. That is part of the deal.” The pain then is part of the happiness now. That is part of the deal.
I have always been very haunted by that line in the film. And I wonder what exactly the character of Joy, as she is portrayed there, meant by it? Her words could be taken to mean something very dark indeed – namely the belief that if ever we experience something good in this life we shall have to pay for it eventually with something terrible. Which, I have to say, I find a bleak and monstrous assertion. But I think she actually meant something rather different.
You see, if you think about it, she was actually describing something that is demonstrably the case: namely the fact that, more often than not, the really important things in life, whatever form they happen to take, have a hefty price tag attached to them.
Imagine, for example, the delight experienced by a man who is at last appointed to his dream job: a senior post, with a huge salary attached to it – a job that has always been the summit of his ambition. However good he is at that job, and however fulfilling he finds it, at the same time, he will also have to contend with the loneliness and isolation that can accompany seniority; he will be faced with hard decisions that only he can make, which may well have major implications for the livelihood and well-being of his junior staff; he will have to shoulder the burden of responsibility for his organisation, with all the stress that goes with that; and alongside all of that, the day will eventually dawn when he has to relinquish all that power and authority – and what then? Very often the things that bring us greatest happiness have pain mixed in with them somewhere.
And a similar thing could be said of the key relationships in our lives. Because the more deeply we love, the more painful will be the loss of that love, whether through separation, or rejection, or ultimately the finality of death.
The greatest, most wonderful things in life all have price tags attached to them, precisely because they have a cost built into them; a cost that is an intrinsic part of what makes them important. The pain then is part of the happiness now. That is part of the deal. Pain and happiness can have a disarmingly close relationship at times; the one very easily becomes part of the other, precisely because they relate to things that matter to us immensely.
I am always fascinated at the way in which biblical themes, and indeed the major Christian festivals, manage to plug into the deepest and most timeless truths of human experience, this one included. We are invited to explore them through story and through worship, in a way that can also help to equip us to deal with them in real life.
And that is very much the case with the theme of our service today: the Presentation of Christ in the Temple: Candlemas. Candlemas is a curiously bittersweet festival in the Church’s calendar. At one level it is of course an occasion for joyful celebration; a high point at which we formally mark the end of the season of Christmas and Epiphany. It is the moment at which the child Jesus is recognised by the aged Simeon as God’s chosen Messiah, the Saviour of Israel. Significantly, that moment of recognition takes place within the Temple, the sacred heart of Israelite worship; the dwelling place of God. It is a wonderful moment of revelation, in which Simeon rejoices that he has lived long enough to see the Lord’s chosen one, and so he can now die in peace.
And yet, as he warns Mary as part of that same revelation, her son’s astonishing destiny will also have one heck of a price tag attached to it: “This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner voices of many will be revealed” – and he then addresses her directly with words that are actually chilling: “a sword will pierce your own soul too.” Being the special recipient of God’s favour can be a mixed blessing sometimes, as Mary discovers to her cost. Because it is a universal truth that transcends both time and culture, that the one who loves most, also grieves most.
Neither of our readings this morning makes for particularly comfortable reading. In our first reading, the prophet Malachi foretells a wonderful event: the coming of the Saviour of Israel to his Temple; an event that is fulfilled in the story of Simeon and the Christ child. And yet, for Malachi, the appearance of the Saviour is not like the dramatic arrival of Superman, who appears out of nowhere to provide an instant solution to life’s problems. Rather, the coming of the Messiah is an event before which we should tremble: because the Saviour’s power to purify will sear the hearts of those whom he finds; he will bring to light truths that were previously hidden; his coming will bring judgement as well as mercy. And if you think about it, how could it be otherwise? Because radical problems require radical solutions. Anything else would be papering over the cracks. Our God is a God of bountiful and abundant grace – but never a God of cheap grace. Because the best things in life never come cheap.
But, of course, the process can work the other way round, as well: just as the best things in life can bring pain in their wake, so too, the bleakest things in life can sometimes be redeemed in a way that brings new life and new hope – and one appreciates their worth the more precisely because sometimes we only truly recognise how dark and desiccated our lives have become, when a new kind of light dawns for us. In the same way, returning to the C.S. Lewis story for a moment, Lewis’s love for Joy Davidman brought light and love into the life of a dried up old Oxford don, and enabled him for the first time ever to live; to flourish; to become more fully the person he truly was and could truly be. And sometimes it is takes the prospect of loss to sharpen our appreciation of what we have. As Lewis himself wrote in 1957, in a letter to Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘We soon learn to love what we know we must lose’.
In his poem ‘One Foot in Eden’ the Orkney poet Edwin Muir, who suffered from terrible periods of black depression himself – so he knew precisely what he was talking about – described in very powerful and striking terms how the fruits of the Garden of Eden are no match for the much richer produce that can come out of a desolate waste:
… Famished field and blackened tree
Bear fruits in Eden never known
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Strange blessings never in paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.
The Methodist J. Neville Ward once wrote: “We all live hurt and hurting lives … But our lives are also the kind that are shaken periodically by beauty and other intensity of happiness, and again and again we are saved by love.” Sometimes it is from precisely within the deepest darkness that new light first dawns; sometimes we only learn what it truly is to love, when that love is costly:
But, then, isn’t it always the case that the things that are most life-changing, and most worthwhile, involve cost – and that entails risk.
On this Sunday a year ago I read to you one of my favourite poems on precisely this theme. And it is such a good poem that I make no apology for reading it again. It is a poem by Janet Rand entitled simply ‘Risks’. And it goes like this:
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool
To weep is to risk being called sentimental
To reach out to another is to risk involvement
To expose feelings is to risk showing your true self
To place your ideas and your dreams before the crowd is to risk being called naïve
To love is to risk not being loved in return
To live is to risk dying
To hope is to risk despair
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken, because the greatest risk in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow, or love.
Chained by his certitude, he is a slave; he has forfeited his freedom.
Only the person who risks is truly free.
Amen.