another dog, or pronounced her name. But in those weeks before she died,
Venus somehow communicated to me that all sadness, whether cosmic, human,
or canine, is one and the same. Somehow, her eyes were all eyes, even God’s
eyes, and the sadness she expressed was a divine and universal sadness. I
wondered if God might have an easier time using animals to communicate who
God is, since they do not seem as willful and devious as we are. Still, I thought,
was this all a projection, a mere product of sentiment and imagination?
A short time later, these ideas crystallized for me while I was on retreat
writing this book. A friend had dropped off a DVD of the critically acclaimed
movie Lion, thinking I needed a break from my work. Grudgingly, I gave in to
some lowly entertainment! As I followed the heartbreaking, true story of an
East Indian boy and his lifelong search for himself and his family, my sadness
reached a tipping point, and I began heaving with tears. The lament “Life is so
unfair” overwhelmed me! There, in the solitude of my retreat, I fell into a kind
of deep despair. Nothing meant anything for hours and into days. I just wanted
off the boat of humanity.
In that moment, I was not sad about any one thing, but about everything. The
tragedies I had witnessed in the previous months all piled up and overflowed
into one big, clumped-together sadness and suffering that I couldn’t escape. It is
what my friend William Paul Young calls the “Great Sadness,” a pain so huge
and so deep, it feels as though it will never end. And yet the sadness was focused
not on one particular issue but on all of them at once.
For me, and I can only say for me, it deeply helped to think back to Venus’s
eyes, and name all of this suffering and sadness as the one sadness of God. Then
I did not have to hold it alone. And I learned I could not hold it alone, but it
was a shared experience—which gave me great consolation. In some deeply
illogical and nonrational way, I identified with what Paul writes at the
beginning of Colossians: “It makes me happy to suffer for you, as I am suffering
now, and in my own body to do what I can to make up all that still has to be
undergone by Christ’’ (Colossians 1:24).
I am no masochist, and I surely have no martyr complex, but I do believe that
the only way out of deep sadness is to go with it and through it. Sometimes I
wonder if this is what we mean when we lift up the chalice of wine at the
Eucharist and say, “Through him, with him, and in him.” I wonder if the only
way to spiritually hold suffering—and not let it destroy us—is to recognize that
we cannot do it alone. When I try to heroically do it alone, I slip into
distractions, denials, and pretending—and I do not learn suffering’s softening