The Woes, Part 2

The Woes, Part 2

“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.”[1]

“Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will weep and mourn.”[2]

These passages are the second and third of the four Woes found in the sixth chapter of Luke. At first glance they seem to indicate that we will bring misfortune upon ourselves for being sated and happy. Yet, Jesus is only affirming a reality of life on earth which is that it naturally oscillates between extremes. The 24 hours of each day oscillate between darkness and light, between sleep and wakefulness, and between activity and rest. We cannot banish darkness from our days by committing to only living in the daylight any more than we can avoid sleeping by staying awake all the time (much as some try). It is an unsustainable and unrealistic expectation to try to live only at one end of any spectrum – like trying to be a pendulum that only swings to the right.

It is the natural oscillations, the back and forth and the ebb and flow, that empower our lives. Their polar ends are not opposites at all but different expressions of the same phenomenon. We know hunger because we know what it is to be full. We know happiness because we know what it is to be sad. We know darkness because we know what it is to be in the light. We cannot know grief until we have also known what it is to love. These states of being are defined and known, not by their opposite, but by their relative absence or shortage.

We often assume that one end of a continuum is bad or evil while the other is good, but we deceive ourselves in doing so. We may experience one end of the spectrum as less pleasant or less desirable than the other, but that does not make one end good and one end bad. It only means we find enjoyment in one more than the other, which in itself is a natural oscillation of our emotions and not cause to condemn one in favor of the other. In fact, since each end is inseparably connected to the other, one cannot be extinguished without also extinguishing the other. Indeed, each of these Woes simply expresses the truth that we cannot always be full without sometimes being hungry, and we cannot always feel happy without sometimes feeling sad.

We can also read the Woes metaphorically and not just literally or physically. To be full of knowledge is considered a good thing, but it is our hunger for knowledge that fuels the quest to increase what we know. And particularly with intellectual knowledge, the more we learn about most topics, the more we realize we do not know, thus creating its own hunger for more. If we feel full of knowledge about a subject, it will be a temporary sense of fullness because the more we ponder the subject the more questions in search of answers will appear. So, if we are full now, we can be sure we will be hungry for more later. The hunger provides the energy for the addressing of that hunger.

With regard to laughing, weeping, and mourning, the joy that causes us to laugh is only possible because we love something or someone. We enjoy being in the company of those we love, and we laugh easily. But that sort of love is not possible without being intermixed with sorrow. When our expectations of our beloved are not met, which will inevitably happen on occasion, our joy traverses to the other end of the spectrum, and we feel sad or mad. And because our feelings of happiness are tied to an earthly subject or object, we know we will be separated from our beloved at some point, and there will be grief commensurate to the joy our beloved brought to us. Regardless, we continue to seek love and laughter. It is ridiculous to think I would have chosen not to have fallen in love with my wife in order to avoid the weight of the sorrow after her death. Our love and her passing are a single reality, and a reality that is still being lived out. There simply cannot be one without the other.

The fourth of the Woes reads, “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”[3] I reflected on this Woe in conjunction with the last two of the Beatitudes, which are strikingly similar, so I will not address it further.

In total, the four Woes serve as reminders that our emotions are not always reliable gauges for reality. We need to ground our judgments in a higher truth than whether something makes us happy or sad. We are blessed by the totality of our experiences, and for that we should be thankful.

This is the 23^rd in a series titled Blessedness and Woe.Life Notes are my explorations into mysteries that interest me. They are invitations for readers to explore more deeply into life’s mysteries. Engage with me or explore contemplative spiritual direction at ghildenbrand@outlook.com.

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[1] Luke 6:25a

[2] Luke 6:25b

[3] Luke 6:26