Joy and Sorrow, Part I

The search for a path through life

My friend Paul recently listened to the conversation “How are You?” on my Idiots and Fools podcast and brought up a comment about Spinoza’s conundrum: “How can there be joy in a world of suffering?"

The remark clearly illustrates the catastrophic limitation of the intellect’s attempts at understanding. It would have been more proper to phrase the question, “how can there not be joy in a world of suffering?”; and this, paradoxically, is because suffering is what births joy in the first place.

I don't expect people to understand this, so some explanations are perhaps in order.

In order to discuss joy and sorrow, I’ll need to bring up something I rarely speak about, and that is the fact that I’m a religious ecstatic.

I mean this entirely in the medieval sense of the word. I’ve had religious ecstasies identical to the ones described in spiritual literature from that period. This is disconcerting, because it’s a thing of ancient times, common to saints, but not to ordinary men who simply walk through modern life without specific intentions or pretensions about devoting themselves to religious matters.

There are human beings who search for religious intensity; there are human beings who are born with it.

Then there are the ones who have it conferred upon them.

Perhaps one day I’ll tell the whole story of how this began, when the Virgin Mary touched me – something I have mentioned in passing on numerous occasions, but never painted the details of at any length. Obviously, it turns out, I have fundamental objections to discussing that in detail, or I would have done it long ago.

What’s important for today’s discussion is not that whole story, but the fact that I fully and absolutely understand what religious ecstasy is, in the sense that I have been within it and understand it.

This is quite different from people who hypothesis about religion and ecstasy; who read or write books about it or deliver historical versions. Thinking about this subject is entirely useless.