-Soren Kierkegaard, Edifying Discourses (Every Good and Perfect Gift Is from Above)

I stumbled upon the above snippet, as I stumble upon everything in Kierkegaard, I am reading along, hanging on by my fingernails, hoping I can stay with his argument, with his eloquence, and, quite out of the blue certain things grip my soul.  I read it once, I suppose it was the line about quiet sorrow that was the hook, I read it again, I backtracked and read the entire page before, going back to the beginning of the heading where he quotes the Scripture from James 1: 17-22.  I read on; breathless with the feeling that some mighty truth lurked here in this “edifying discourse.”  I finished reading not quite sure that anything else in the writing quite resolved the dynamic tension that I felt when I first read those words, “So they sat in their quiet sorrow…”

            I felt my heart pulled back towards them over the course of the next week or so, so much that whenever I would sit down with other works, with the exception of the Scriptures, I would find myself thinking about this line.  It didn’t fit into any of the sermons I was writing and I am loath to try and force something into a sermon where it does not belong besides I always feel a little like I am showing off when I use Kierkegaard, I wonder if it is really effective to use someone so deep that I barely understand him myself.  But this snippet will not leave me alone until I give it some reflection, therefore I will use the most flexible public forum available to me, here on this website, which only a few people browse through each month, to tell what important burden the Dense Dane has laid upon my soul.

            First off there was the hook, sitting in quiet sorrow, which describes my state of mind with Haiku-like efficiency.  The grief of my brother’s death has now passed through several phases and come to rest, so to speak, in a sort of mild sadness that permeates the most everyday things of life.  It does not deaden the joys of life: the laughter of children, the spirit of worship in the church, the beauty of God’s creation all have begun to break apart this sorrow on a fairly regular basis but in the in between times there is always this quiet sorrow.  Kierkegaard, as far as I can tell, was talking here about the longing for something better that comes with faith in Christ and the “good and perfect gift” of that faith through grace.  Quiet sorrow might be a condition that marks spiritual maturity, then again I might be boasting too much.  Nevertheless, quiet sorrow, while it was the hook of this quotation, was not the touchstone.  I thought to myself, “quiet sorrow, there’s something, pay attention.”

            Next came the thought about not hardening themselves against the consolation of the Word, and that too speaks of deep truth.  It was the Word that brought comfort in the dark hours of that writhing, fresh grief.  It was the Word that brought crystalline statement of our deepest pain: “By the rivers of Babylon- there we sat and we wept when we remembered Zion.  On the willows there we hung up our harps.” (Psalm 137: 1-2)  Or perhaps the haunting climax of David’s punishment, “David said to his servants, ‘Is the child dead?’ They said, ‘He is dead.’”(2 Samuel 12: 19)  These things, lines from the Word of God, now reflect moments frozen in time for me, they articulate things that cannot be fully related in mere mortal words.  Yet they are the consolation of the word, they speak to deep places in my heart.

            The new thing that God has done is perhaps related to the humility that SK talks about, the humility to, “acknowledge that life is a dark saying,” meaning that it is not fully understood and often it seems more than a little ominous.  The arrogance of humanity has always stood contrary to the overwhelming majesty of our God.  We think we know more than we do and this leads us to commit sin out of the depth of our ignorance.  Life is a dark saying, children die, good people get cancer, wars tear us apart and we are full of anger and hatred in one form or another.  But SK tells us that in the life of faith we should look expectantly for some “explanatory word.”  I’m fairly sure that those words of Scripture, and, by extension, this sentence of Kierkegaard are, for me, part of that explanatory word.

            The time it takes to write this reflection might also be in line with SK’s ideas here, looking for that explanatory word with proper humility will preclude one from going off half cocked.  I could generally spout off a great deal of highly emotional response to such thoughts but I didn’t do it right away.  The last phrase of this sentence about being slow to speak and also slow to wrath also speaks to me and I think to the entire world, or at the very least the community of faith.  We all respond too often in the heat of the moment, we say things we don’t mean, we cast words about like savage weapons and we inflict great harm on one another.  Wisdom is seldom found in impetuous action and spur of the moment rhetoric.  Those explanatory words and this quotation are more like seeds that have been planted in my heart, they have not grown, yet.  But they are there for a reason, to be nurtured in quiet sorrow, to be fed by the consolation of the word, to be given time in humble reflection of life’s dark saying, so that one day they might bear fruit for the kingdom of heaven.