Ancient spiritual insights for modern political grief

Religion, at its core, is about befriending reality rather than resisting it

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

In my new Washington Post column [free link], I make what for some might be a controversial claim — that religion is more closely aligned with reality and our perception of it than non-religion is.

Why is religion particularly well-placed to help us confront loss? First, all the major faith traditions acknowledge in no uncertain terms that suffering, defeat, failure, and pain are intrinsic to the human experience. To expect a life without suffering would not have occurred to the religious individual, at least not before modernity. The most obvious example being that if you had many children, there was a good chance that one of them would not reach adulthood.

That religion is more closely aligned with reality isn’t necessarily proof of its truth. One could simply say that religion, as a man-made construct, simply adapted — and tried to speak to — the experience of the vast majority of human beings as they were. But this gives religion an advantage over competing belief systems in the modern period: Since it was forged in pre-modernity when (physical) suffering or death was much more commonplace, it had to have something compelling to say about suffering in the first place.

Because religion came to be a in a world without anti-depressants, it had to, in some sense, normalize melancholy rather than pathologizing it. It’s not an accident that the “dark night of the soul” figures in the three Abrahamic faiths.

One of the most famous Quranic verses is bracing in this regard, and one that I remember being recited to me whenever things got difficult: “Verily, we have created man in struggle,” although interestingly the Arabic word for struggle here, kabad, can also be translated as “distress” and “hardship.”

Another such verse, as I discuss in my Post column, is one I’ve half-jokingly referred to as “the breakup verse”:

You may dislike something although it is good for you, or like something although it is bad for you: God knows and you do not.

I love this verse. It’s sort of ready-made for the many disappointments of life, and one that I think applies quite well to politics. As mere mortals, we can’t know with certainty whether a Trump or Harris victory would ultimately be better for America, the world or ourselves in the broader sweep of time.

In other words, because religion centers God over the will of individuals, it allows us to come to terms with our own lack of control. True control is beyond us. Which means that, for all we know, this — somehow, as improbably as it may seem — could be good. Even if everything happens for a reason, it doesn’t mean we know what those reasons are.