It's a Pity

Just after college, I was a member of a tight group of friends in Redding. We referred to ourselves as our "Redding Family", as most of us had little to no actual family within several hundred miles. One by one we started coupling up and today all but two of us are married to other "family" members. As one of the last to get married, this was a little hard for me at times. One of the couples especially were quite cuddly and affectionate. They were (rarely) inappropriate, but as a single person who wished very much to experience what they were experiencing, I found myself wishing they would tone it down just a little. It was all well and good to be in love, I believed, but if it could express itself a little less publicly, it would be easier for the rest of us lonely people. Have a little pity on us, would ya?

I realised yesterday that this attitude was wrong. It happened because my wife and I were sitting rather closley--not cuddling, really, but very nearly so--and a friend next to us asked us if we could stop touching each other so much. After a moment of the kind I've heard referred to as a "pregnant pause", he added that it was because it made him miss his girlfriend. I immediately felt sorry for him--after all, I've missed my girlfriend before as well and I would agree: it sucks. And so my first thought was that maybe we should tone it down a bit--or even a lot. It's cruel of us to rub our love in his face, he who has such unfulfilled longing. But then I thought, "wait a minute. Why should I stop enjoying my wife's presence just because you cannot enjoy yours?" It suddenly seemed very unfair of him to even ask. And I suddenly saw my former requests of my Redding Family as what they were: jealous attempts to hold their joy hostage.

I get that phrase from C.S. Lewis' book "The Great Divorce". In it he describes the difference between true pity and perverted pity. True pity makes you want to help a person get out of their sadness, their poorness or their misery and enter into the happiness, riches or joy that you are experiencing. Perverted pity makes you want to give up what you have so that together you can be miserable. The thing is, people don't normally feel perverted pity on their own, their pity has to be twisted by the other. Why would anyone want to give up their joy? But when we are miserable, we ask others to do it all the time. 'Misery loves company', the saying goes, and it's true. We try to take others' happiness hostage so that we will know that while we may still be miserable, at least there are few people who are less miserable than us.

This, I believe, is why the Bible says to rejoice in each others' joy and suffer in their misery. The second part calls the joyful to have pity, to not flee from the sadness that inevitably surrounds them. But the first part calls the miserable to not pervert that pity. While they are commisserating with you in your down times, rejoice with them in their uptimes. There again is that theme of selflessness that runs so strongly through the Faith and so weakly through our lives.

For now I'm going to enjoy my wife (what he didn't know was that we were already making an attempt to 'tone it down'!) even as, when I talk with my friend, I allow myself to remember the loneliness I felt not that long ago. God give me the grace to do so.