The Gift of Disappointment
Why It’s Good That Everything and Everyone in this World Will Let You Down
"And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise." – Jesus
“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.” – Jesus
"Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?”
Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times." – Matthew 18:22-23
Nothing and no one in life will ever live up to your expectations.
How’s that for an uplifting message? Perhaps you’ll think me mad, but I shall presently argue that this truth is one of the greatest gifts we could receive in this life. But we must be ready, wisely prepared, and willing to receive it.
If you read my work with any regularity you will likely have perceived that I think everything Good in life is downstream from humility. In the Christian tradition, pride is always the root of the tree of vices. All wrongdoing stems from wrong thinking about the character of God and our place in the world. To put it more pointedly, the wrong and suffering in life comes from trying to be God - from thinking the universe exists to satisfy our desires. This is spiritual pride, an overinflated sense of our importance and our foolish demand that reality conform to our whim and craving. By contrast, humility, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is simply an accurate appraisal of ourselves and our place in this world, tragic flaws and all.
When we set up conditions for the real world, when we expect that people and events, even fate (or I say, providence) itself, must do as we say, we inevitably run into disappointment. Things never really quite work out as planned. The people we love and trust the most can and often do betray us. The people who openly acknowledged the divinity of Jesus and were his closest friends ran away, abandoning him to be brutally executed as a criminal. And in microcosm, this sort of thing happens to us all the time. Less severely, we very often, perhaps always, never exactly get what we want out of life. This state of affairs leaves us with two options: a despairing nihilism or transcendent spiritual growth. I think the contrast is truly that stark.
Nihilistic despair is at root a frustrated idealism. We envision a “perfect” world where everyone and everything conforms to our desires. And reality never measures up. Things are what they are. I suppose a middle path would be to resign ourselves to this fact and live at the mercy of life. I reject this as any wise way to live, much as I reject the posture of despair. The conditions of life call upon us to act. And how we respond to the truth of disappointment will ultimately color whether we receive the priceless gift in question or toss it to the rubbish heap like petulant children. I give here my standard caveat that I often do the latter. I’m not playing a sanctimonious game here, but speaking out of concern for each of us that we learn the lessons from the chastisements that living sets before us.
Looking in the Mirror
The Bard famously placed this line in the mouth of Cassius: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves”. When our designs are inevitably frustrated we have two paths that involve turning inward. The foolish path is lament, to rail against, to borrow another phrase from the man of Avon, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. In modern parlance, we can complain. The contrary path is to look at that fault in ourselves. For the purposes of clarity, let’s proceed by dealing with relationships. You can easily extrapolate the principles here to cover events as well.
There’s a now (sadly) cliché proverb that advises we not seek to have what we want but instead learn to want what we have. This need not be taken as an aspersion cast on aspiration. By all means pursue your noble aims in life. We ought to be pleased with the way things are but perhaps in this life never fully satisfied. There is indeed something wrong with life that we are called to fix in some small way. But as the old map makers cautioned us, “there be dragons”. Better we get our bearings in the day-to -day before we cast our eyes to the grand horizons yet explored.
What I’m attempting to get at is that we need to see clearly what it is in ourselves that contributes to our suffering and disappointment. This exposure of character flaws is what life is trying to teach us by frustrating our small desires. Read over the second quotation of Jesus’s teaching in the epigraph above. When people in our lives do not behave as we would have them, do we lash out in condemnation or do we examine our own behavior for the same wrongdoing? There’s only one set of actions over which we have non-coercive control – our own. The other person may be acting wrongly but to grow we must divert our attention from such things and use them as a lamp that illumines our own transgressions.
This is the first gift of disappointment. Those strong emotions that well up in protest against frustrated desire are a mirror that exposes the sins in our own hearts and actions. This is a profound goodness. We would do well to attend to that log in our eye before we dare to examine the speck in our brother’s. This painful work will enable us to grow in love, faithfulness, and compassion in a way that mere pursuit of our ambitions can never provide.
The third quote above is a teaching that is a bit strange to our modern ear. Rabbis of the time counseled forgiveness up to three times. Peter is being overgenerous when he suggests, perhaps self-righteously, that Jesus would counsel up to seven times. Jesus’s reply to Peter is not meant to prescribe a literal 77 times, at which point the 78th wrong done to us is unforgivable. The phrase has a metaphorical meaning of essentially limitless. Jesus is saying that we forgive and forgive and forgive again. After all, are we not guilty of the same trespasses that our relations make against us? Our forgiveness should stem from an acute recognition of that pesky log described earlier. This is a wound to our pride that seeks at high cost to prove to ourselves and the world that we really are good people. But very often we are not. Part and parcel of being human is a deep brokenness and attraction to what is wrong. We are to extend that understanding to others. As a small clarification, since I will write at length on forgiveness at another time, what is in view here is not the eternal tolerance of evil and harm to ourselves and others. Forgiveness here is the refusal to exact revenge that we may be very well entitled to. We don’t “hold things against” people, even if it be wise and warranted to part ways with them.
The foregoing describes the sort of “internal work” that we undertake when viewing plainly our disappointments. The first quotation in the epigraph deals with the external work. The teaching is the famous so-called “Golden Rule”. However, I fear that we often misunderstand the dictum to be a passive thing. We regularly regard it as a sort of Hippocratic oath in which we merely refrain from harming others. The verb translated as “do” after the comma is in Greek “ποιεῖτε” (poieite). If you will permit me a small digression into grammar, that verb is in the present imperative active tense. That’s a fancy way of saying that it is an ongoing command. The way we desire to be treated, we are to go and do that to others. Actively, now, ongoing, repeatedly, all our lives long.
Has our spouse made a snide comment we didn’t deserve? Let us forgive it (not repay it, though it may be deserved) and respond instead with a word of encouragement or a compliment or a hug. Are we not receiving our due praise at work? Let us let that sense of being slighted go and then continue in diligence to do a good job because we know it is right. Let’s even praise our incompetent boss, because we’d all like a bit of grace even when we are royally messing things up. I don’t mean lie and tell people they are doing something well when they are not. Your boss might be an awful manager, but there are very few totally corrupt people in which there is nothing praiseworthy. Let’s look for those things and accentuate them. You can, I’m sure, get creative and figure out how to apply this teaching to everyone you deal with. And once again, I wallow in frequent failure here. We should attempt it anyway.
What I’ve thus far presented is two-thirds of the path through disappointment that results in growth. We look inward with sober eyes in order that we can then turn around act out in the world the things which we think are missing, instead of greedily demanding we be satisfied for no other reason than our existence. I am somewhat sad to pull out another cliché that finds its way onto all and sundry inspirational posters, but alas it is fitting for us to “be the change you want to see in the world”.
We must ask ourselves whether we want our fickle hungers to be satisfied by the world and others, or whether we want to be the rock, the comforting haven, to which others turn and stand upon in the vilest of life’s storms. Though I fail, though I am sometimes double-minded, my heart’s longing is to be that rock and refuge.
Looking to the Heavens
We’ve dealt with a way of looking inward and with a way of looking outward to the world and people around us. We come now to what I think is the ultimate lesson in confronting our frustrations and disappointments. The task is to look “upward”. We must here speak largely in metaphor for we approaching territory where words fail. God is not “up there” in any literal sense. We use this language to point to something beyond what we take in through our senses. Though, our senses convey some of the transcendent to us. In fact, this is in large part the function of beauty. It points to something beyond ourselves and this world.
The philosophers have always dealt with and pursued the Good, True, and Beautiful. This is the triad with which God also deals. But in the end, these are all signs pointing to the thing-in-itself, the transcendent ground of Being, which is God Himself. See, there is something wrong with the world. It’s not the way it should be. But, we must take the utmost caution not to confuse “the way it should be” with the “way we want it to be”. The latter posture will lead us to blame God for the wrong in the world. We must never forget that the fault is in ourselves. When we take things as they are, and ourselves and others as we are, we will notice that things are in progress toward what they “should be” - ultimately what God wants them to be. His whole purpose is to renew and repair this broken existence and widespread injustice we call life. That disappointing thing we so lash out against.
Seeing the cosmic vision for how things should and will someday be requires in the end that we become disappointed with God Himself. I don’t mean this in any sacrilegious way. God is by definition that being which there can be none greater. He is perfect Goodness. But remember that we are not. And so being, at first, disappointed with God’s plan is really disillusionment. We drop our selfish ambitions, our pretenses, our grasping at fleeting and addictive pleasures. We see things clearly. Disappointment is to lose our illusions and expectations. Then we are left with the Truth. We are not living up to the call. We expected something of God and life that was pitiful shadow of the radiantly Good thing he intended. To quote C. S. Lewis:
“Our desires are not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
I proclaim to you that there is forgiveness for this if we will acknowledge it, if we’ll own up to it. Once we do, we find that God will never let us down. He is perfect Love, Compassion, Faithfulness, Goodness, Beauty.
In the final weighing, we are the truly disappointing things. We have spent too much time expecting life and God to do for us something that life and God expect us to do for them.
The miracle is that when we see this and commit to remedying it we will find assistance and power to do it that seemed unfathomable before. When the scales fall from our eyes and the pride is banished from our hearts, we find grace and power beyond our wildest dreams.
Disappointment is a glorious gift we didn’t know we wanted -
One we didn’t know how desperately we needed.
The Gift of Disappointment
This essay does indeed make one think on these things. Would be helpful to have some examples of disappointments, event or relationship, and how the process of "inward, outward, and upward" would actually play out. I think I get it but would like to be taken through an example.
Beautifully written, Brady. I needed to read this. Well done.