Not all of London is sunshine and rhododendrons. In fact, the distinct lack of sunshine prevents me from using a hairdryer in the bathroom and opening an upper story window to its fullest extent–suicide preventative measures instituted as part of the infamous “health and safety” legislation.
The winter gloom and city anti-sociality provoked two goons, christening themselves the “Love Police,” to harass the public into a better mood. They hug uneasy cops, tease passers by about a breaking discovery that swine flu is contagious via eye contact, and generally shout up an amicable sort of anarchy. To steal a little of Michael Jackson’s Cheers and Jeers thunder, London weather deserves a hearty round of the latter. As does the health care system, with its “take your pulse, poke at your skull a little” method of determining the damage done by multiple concussions, and its recent wave of rationing that even The Guardian lambasted. As do the pigeons: yesterday one so horrifying brandished its diseased head at me that I gave way to IT on the sidewalk.
Our cheer arrives with the recognition of suffering’s great benefits. As any self-respecting Seminar IV-educated PLS student knows, and as Malthus taught in his Essay on the Principle of Population, want is the primary catalyst for intellectual and spiritual improvement. Physical need drives action and transforms mind into matter. Discomfort not only motivates material improvement, but also tests and purifies virtue.
Malthus writes, “The first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the wants of the body,” and, “Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity. We are not patiently to submit to it, but to exert ourselves to avoid it. . . the more successful these efforts are, the more [we] will probably improve and exalt [our] own mind and the more completely [do we] appear to fulfill the will of his Creator.”
Zechariah 13:9 confirms, “This third I will bring into the fire; I will refine them like silver and test them like gold. They will call on my name and I will answer them; I will say, ‘They are my people,’ and they will say, ‘The LORD is our God.'”
Zechariah provides a nice religious segue into a recent sermon. The priest discussed the difficult liturgical juxtaposition of Christ’s birth and Herod’s slaughter of the innocents. “Hope and joy do not last long in this world,” he said, explaining how evil causes us to question God’s sufficiency. The birth of Christ, he said, can only be understood in light of the slaughter of the innocents. The slaughter of the innocents can only be understood in light of Good Friday. Good Friday can only be understood in light of Easter Sunday.
The suffering, then, incurred through two pairs of rain-ruined shoes, the humiliation of a botched presentation (think the public attorney from My Cousin Vinny), or through matters more serious, prove a blessing well disguised. We ought all to thank God for each misfortune, discomfort, and tragedy. Augustine wrote in City of God, “The fire which makes gold shine makes chaff smoke.” Aristotle detailed the method by which virtue grows in Nichomachean Ethics: “By abstaining from pleasures we become temperate.”
Lest I seem a melancholy ingrate, allow me to cheer this experience abroad a bit more. A never-ending network of alleys, curiosity shops, eateries, agencies, academies, parks, and phrontisteries beckons the intrepid from the gut of the city to its phalanges. To one normally forced by time constraints to follow a beaten path to and fro the Notre Dame London Centre, realizing the density of locations astounds. Every single bit of space is filled with something constructive, something that to someone is as meaningful as my flat is to me.
What amazes further is that this man-made maze tenders a poor metaphor for the design of the universe as a whole. No matter how close one looks, still more interesting bits await discovery. From the cosmos to the planet to the strange quark, prospects for pondering mushroom.
As if quarks were not grand enough, the populace of London’s labyrinth provide further fodder for cheering. My boss at the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales took us on field trips to Liverpool and Parliament and said a teary goodbye with Irish chocolates.
My roommate demonstrates such gentleness of spirit that I still question the status of her neurons when I accidentally wake her; surely no human free of REM could speak so cheerfully at 6 am. My Lebanese friends giggle over our “Hollywood” accent and share their love through generous picnics and Good Friday flowers.
My SOAS pals, when not too busy protesting the carbon content of Tibet, amaze with the subtlety of their wit and the openness of their friendship. For them, a simple request for bug repellant spirals into a debate about societal responsibility, and leads to such gems as, “To be clear, I don’t want to destroy the world. I think you extrapolated a bit,” and “Individual rationality, collective irrationality!” My delightfully sardonic Arabic professor, who after criticizing our class performance, soothes, “But it’s all right – we’re all just going to die anyway.”
Sue Gerhardt’s Why Love Matters and David Brooks’ The Social Animal teach that humans develop in relationship. Not only in a vague, character-forming sort of way do we influence our neighbors, but our brains are literally formed through human interaction. Brooks claims scientists can predict with 77 percent accuracy at 18 months who will graduate from high school based on maternal attachment.
Gerhardt explains that the “orbitofrontal cortex, which is so much about being human, develops almost entirely post-natally.” This development does not occur automatically, nor can the baby complete it independently. In one fascinating passage, Gerhardt demonstrates how positive looks, that is, loving eye contact and smiles, are the most vital stimulus to the growth of the socially intelligent brain.
On the flip side, she writes, “[W]ork done with Romanian orphans has shown that those who were cut off from close bonds with an adult by being let in their cots all day, unable to make relationships, had a virtual black hole where their orbitofrontal cortex should be.” Gerhardt and Brooks’ findings emphasize what many know and most neglect: In life, PEOPLE are most important.
To tie together these London Easter reflections, I plead assistance from Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. He writes, “For it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch with a never-ending complexity.”
“The Church contains what the world does not contain. Life itself does not provide as she does for all sides of life. That every other single system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma…Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger…How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching peace and preventing wars.”
Christianity, like Whitman, envelops multitudes. From London springs geysers of suffering and joy, joy through suffering, joy because suffering. From the cross, Jesus recognized it; from Heaven and our hearts, he now proclaims it.
“Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama,” Chesterton tells us. “It is not only an occasion for the peacemakers any more than for the merry makers; it is not only a Hindu peace conference any more than it is only a Scandinavian winter feast. There is something defiant in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won.”
Katie Petrik is a junior double majoring in PLS and Arabic. Contact her at kpetrik@nd.edu.
