Thought for the week: wishing you a sorrow-free New Year

‘What does that mean?’ asked the English nurse, Mrs. Wright. ‘It readies the ground’, replied Anna.

That exchange takes place early in the gripping film ‘The Wonder’, now available on Netflix. The setting is Ireland in the 1850’s when memories of ‘The Great Hunger’ are still vivid. Deep in rural Ireland the parents of a young girl claim that she is surviving without eating, and a local committee bring in a nun and a nurse to keep watch over the girl, in order to test the authenticity of the claims.

As the story develops levels of duplicity and superstition are revealed---but I give no further spoilers. Is sorrow God’s spade? Without impugning the character of God, we could not say that about events recently when desperate immigrants lost their lives crossing the English channel on one of the coldest nights of the year, and when four children died in a frozen lake at Solihull. To suggest that there was some purpose or hidden benefit in such tragic episodes is to show an astounding lack of compassion.

Undoubtedly, God can bring some good out of the heartbreaking twists and turns of life, whether they be caused by natural disaster or human folly and malevolence. Joseph, with the benefit of hindsight, was convinced that out of the jealousy and treachery of his brothers, God was able to bring some good.

He told them, ‘You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good’ (Genesis 50;20). Likewise, Paul’s battle with the unspecified ‘thorn in the flesh’, and his unanswered prayers, led him to a conviction that God’s power was made perfect in his weakness (2 Corinthians 12; 7-9).

Perhaps when one emerges from a dark valley we are able to see the hand of God in it, but not before. An old verse puts it like this; ‘I walked a mile with laughter, she chattered all the way, But left her none the wiser for all she had to say. I walked a mile with sorrow, and never a word said she, But oh, the lessons that I learnt when sorrow walked with me’

There are many for whom a walk with sorrow only serves to harden the heart. Yet the novelist Steinbeck may be right when he suggested that there are lessons that can be learned in no other way. ‘Humanity’, he wrote ‘has developed no technique to take the place of anguish’. It readies the human heart for the richer growth of other qualities.

After the burial of his own child, a Scottish cleric wrote to a colleague about the devastating experience he had just passed through: ‘It was a strange thing to come away from Edinburgh the other day, thinking of that little grave all alone in the Dean Cemetery….. He was a very placid tranquil little fellow just beginning to smile in recognition to his mother. Life seems deeper now somehow, and enriched rather than impoverished’.

Nevertheless, I wish you a sorrow-free New Year.