Edward Hoagland’s essay, “Heaven and Nature,” deals with a topic people usually don’t want to think about: suicide. His meditation on suicide may apply to anyone, including someone who doesn’t – at least outwardly – appear troubled by anything.
Our faces are not molded as if joy were a preponderant experience. (Nor is a caribou’s or a thrush’s.) Our faces in repose look stoic and battered, and people of the sunniest temperament sometimes die utterly unstrung, doubting everything they have ever believed in or have done.
Hoagland tempers his bleak discussion with a matter-of-fact tone. And in the bleakness of his essay, there are some kernels of light.
He discusses what it takes to negotiate the cracks and fissures of life. Sometimes it’s a matter of not dwelling on misery. Love and prayer are other answers. However, he doesn’t present them as a quick fix. Meaning to say, if you pray, you need to work out, over time, what prayer means to you, what you believe in, what you think can sustain you. This may not be the same from one year to another, or one decade of your life to another. Similarly, with love – habits of love are key to making love powerful. You need to stay open to “new and sudden insights” or engage in a “long practice” of love. And this applies to love in different forms, not limited to romance.
He also talks about the urge to achieve a unity with something larger, to transcend the self, and for nature itself to be wedded to Heaven. This unity is also something to work towards actively, and you aren’t guaranteed complete freedom from harrowing doubt.
Just to be perfectly clear, this isn’t a self-help essay. It isn’t an easy read either, and Hoagland isn’t doling out solutions (and especially not one-size-fits-all solutions). Reading this essay is a challenge, and it may not be for everyone in every frame of mind.
What helps keep me alive is a belief in the meaning of life and holiness of it. Not to regard people as sentient sacks of meat or bags of water, as organic trash. Seeing the moments of life, day to day, as holy and meaningful requires regular practice and considered choices. It also involves flexibility and adjustments over time. To not let myself dry up spiritually is a matter of consistent effort, and I do fail at it. But, when I fail, I have to remind myself that I haven’t reached my end. Instead, I need to keep walking through that desert, experiencing the desert and finding meaning in it (which isn’t the same thing as finding happiness). And staying open to the possibility that the landscape will change or that I’ll find things in the desert that are possibly good.
I write this as someone who’s religious. Religion itself is a regular practice, a deep wrestling. It isn’t a source of pat answers, though the practice of it may become stale and crumble into clichés. Regardless of what religion you practice – or whether you even consider yourself religious – you need to find what it is that sustains you. And then sustain it through repeated choice, through practices that you may need to change as the years pass. What are your relationships with others, with the world, with what transcends you? If you don’t know, keep thinking about it. Keep searching, and be patient. Keep choosing life.
It’s interesting how an essay that deals with a grim topic can bring out a response that affirms life, but it had that effect on me, even with an awareness of the doubting, the fear, the darkness.
Bright Across the Lifespan 