"...THAN YOU CAN UNDERSTAND."
From W.B. Yeats’ “The Stolen Child”
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
We don’t know nearly as much as we think we do. Most of what we think we know is really a mash of instinctive impressions and half-tested opinions. If we’re honest, a lot of the time what we confidently proclaim is not the product of methodical thought but rather the recitation of what we’ve heard from a source we’ve decided (often as haphazardly) to trust to tell us the truth. Moreover, the twenty-four-hour news cycle can give us the impression that we’re constantly being apprised of the most-important facts. Even a few hours of cursory viewing reveals this not to be the case.
We get by, though, and I’m not suggesting that it’s feasible to examine exhaustively every single article of our minds. But we could do with a bit more humility to remind us, especially in moments when we’re tempted to really smack down our opponents in debate (or maybe just family members in a dinner discussion), that our comprehensive vision of the world is more incomplete and fragile than feels comfortable to admit. We’d feel safer and more confident if we knew more--but we don’t.
The twentieth-century poet William Butler Yeats struggled with this idea, and sought throughout his life to sense the transcendental meaning of a world that seemed to become more unmanageably large by the year. Perplexed both by the terrors of authoritarian governments and the anarchies of popular revolutions, Yeats was burdened by the darkness of humanity’s repeated attempts to remake the world according to its competing visions of utopia.
By the end of his life, Yeats had grown despondent, and was known to reach out through divination to grasp a truth he seemed no longer to hope was real. In his famous poem “The Stolen Child” the mystical beings invite a young person in their innocence to flee a world “full of troubles and anxious in its sleep” before their innocence is lost. It is a common theme: to wish for that time in life before we learned the things that hurt to know.
We’re living in a time when Yeats’ words might be striking us in a new way. Whether through the many sufferings brought on by the epidemic, the shaking of our economic confidence, or the revelation of rampant injustice and violence, we’ve all been touched by the fear that the world as we knew it was much less secure than we believed. We’re learning that a lot of hard and awful things may have been going on all around us, real but perhaps invisible. And if we’ve pursued the thought a bit more, we get the sense that there’s probably even more things that I haven’t seen that just aren’t visible yet. And so we’re all learning in a new way that the world is more full of weeping than we can understand.
But this is always true. We do not know, at any time, how deeply the mystery of sin afflicts the world. We do not know how deeply sin runs in every one of our hearts. We also do not see how glorious heaven is, neither do we see the fullness of our stature as the children of God, the weight of glory in each of us. It is by the grace of God we don’t see all of this, a mercy that knows the frailty of our nature. We are not yet ready to see the full truth. To see now too much of our glory would produce in us an indomitable pride--as C.S. Lewis said, we’d be tempted to worship ourselves. To see now too much of our darkness would produce in us utter despair. God alone sees all, knows the depth of our sin, and yet loves us. Right now, we’re in a season of apocalypse, of revealing. It weighs very heavily, but we have only seen a bit more of what has always been there since the Fall.
The world is full of troubles and anxious in its sleep, but we must not retreat into the world of dreams. Christians are not escapists, ever. At all times, we are called to weep with the weeping world, yet lead it by the hand to the One who alone can redeem its suffering. The fullness of the world’s weeping is a truth that can only be understood through the Cross. There, on the world’s worst day, the triumphant Christ tramples down death by death and absorbs the vengeance of all wrongs, entrusting Himself to God in utter humility. On Easter, Christ is vindicated and raised up in the Resurrection, the power of which alone can heal the horror of sin. Here is the center of all wisdom, it is the place we must bring all our suffering and it is the only place from which we can draw true life and healing.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon us!