Favorite Verses for Tough Times

The original request was for favorite Bible verses. I have to confess I don't read the Bible, but I wondered whether it would be possible to list verses (no matter their source) that have sustained me in times of real need, rather than a list of verses from one source only.

Great literature contains many sustaining passages that are vehicles for enduring truths that can guide, comfort, or awaken us to action. We are often enthralled by ideas that seem larger than our comprehension, ideas that open our minds to new awareness of life, or nature, or art. Such literature has abiding worth, and is rightly treasured. All literature prompts us to think; great literature allows us to follow unaccustomed lines of thought to powerful conclusions that can change us. Think of the first time you read All Quiet on The Western Front. Or King Lear. Or Catch-22, for that matter.

As children, we are herded along to hear whatever liturgy is being recited on the appropriate days of worship, and either block out what we are bored with, or fall into the rhythm of the language. I study language, so many verses I have heard stay with me; I study literature, so I see many of the influences of religious teaching in the works I read. One Christian verse that has stayed with me is from John, 15.13 -- "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." The concept of valuing life to the extent that one would rather give it up so that others might live is ennobling, isn't it? Perhaps that's why Sydney Carton is one of my favorite characters in Dickens; it is a far, far, better thing that he does, and we respect his action in giving up his life.

"I was born in a cross-fire hurricane, and I howled at my ma in the driving rain" sings Mick Jagger, and I think I know how he feels. Belfast in the seventies was an ugly place to be (it's gorgeous now -- go visit; you'll be amazed at what a great city it is), and when the Peace Movement started, there was one bible verse that was always recited at rallies (it's 1 Corinthians 13): "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ²And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast,^* but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹²For now we see in a mirror, dimly,^* but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

Now that's worth thinking about.

If any of you have ever been prone to recurrent depression, you will know that sinking realization that the sunlight is slipping away again, and that dull, empty feeling in the heart where there really should be joy. Hamlet says at one point that his mind is a "sterile promontory" and that's a great image: a bleak headland overlooking the world, but caught in a lifeless vacuum. Who would want to be there? One poem that describes for me how depression is larger than my mind and wider than my scope to fend it off, is by Gerard Manly Hopkins.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

Comfort, no matter how small or fragile, is the greatest boon for someone caught in the ennervating cycle of depression. These lines also lead me back to Lear, on the heath, when he realizes that man is a poor, forked animal with no defenses against the storm unless wealth bring him a roof over his head or warm clothes to wear. How close we are to the edge, when we see no comfort near, and know of none to come.

I woke on the morning of September 12th, 2001, with a horrible feeling in my chest, as if something was being sucked out of my ribcage. Well, a poor description. I had a bookshelf for a headboard at the time, and lifted down a volume at random; searching for answers, I suppose. I found in my hand the Bhagavad Gita, and the verses my eyes fell on were these: "he [. . .] who is situated in the self and regards alike happiness and distress; who looks upon a lump of earth, a stone and a piece of gold with an equal eye; who is equal toward the desirable and the undesirable; who is steady, situated equally well in praise and blame, honor and dishonor; who treats alike both friend and enemy; and who has renounced all material activities—such a person is said to have transcended the modes of nature" (14.22-25).

Now, that didn't for a minute make me feel any better about the folk holding hands as they jumped. But it did help to calm me down. A little. I scanned through the text, saw verses about the blind bringing destruction -- but I can't remember now where that passage was. It is impossible for me to think about September 11th, 2001, without being appalled. And by no means could I ever reduce the event for to "just another disaster." But if we are to respect the life that was lost that day, we must also respect all lives lost EVERY day to disaster, natural or manmade; lives lost to anger, or greed, or pain. The children impaled on iron railings, for example, that led to the Peace Movement in Belfast being formed in the first place. The bombings in Omagh. All bombs, then, everywhere, that have exploded and ended lives. All tsunamis and hurricanes and typhoons that have swept life away. "I see all people rushing full speed into Your mouths, as moths dash to destruction in a blazing fire" (Quran 11.29). Life either has meaning, or it hasn't. If we value life, then we value all of it, not just the lives that are most like ours, or the lives that we believe are worthy. I found this in the Quran, too: " if any one slew a person [. . .] it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people" (5.32). So. Another fruitful line of thought.

I thought I'd better end this on a more upbeat note. One writer with a heart bigger than the societal norms of his day was surely Mark Twain. It pains me to think that there are actually folk who won't read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of one particular word. There are folk who have actually banned this novel and forbidden children to read it.  I guess they haven't read it themselves, because they are missing out on Huck's determination to keep Jim (a runaway slave) free, no matter what it may cost him. Society has told Huck (who is a child, remember) that people who help runaways will go to hell. Huck turns his back on all that he has been so nefariously taught and decides that if going to hell is what it takes to keep Jim free, then so be it. Quite a flash of humanity and nobility for a no-good piece of white trash, eh? By contrasting Huck's innate goodness with the inhumane teachings of contempaneous society, Twain manages to show us honor and respect at their finest, in the determination of a young boy who knows that all life is equal, no matter what the church ladies might say. Amen to that.