Talking about . . . hope

 
Buy Angela's Ashes from Amazon.co.uk or from Amazon.com
Buy Angela's Ashes from Amazon.co.uk or from Amazon.com
Buy The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe from Amazon.co.uk or from Amazon.com

Lots of people talk about ‘misery memoirs’ these days. This is an increasingly popular literary genre through which people tell the tragic and woeful story of their lives.

For example, high on many people’s Christmas list were Sharon Osbourne’s Extreme and Frank Bruno’s Fighting Back. Each tells of the writer’s struggle and despair at various points in their lives. Sharon openly recounts everything from her early life as the daughter of a lying, cheating rock manager who manipulated and used her, through her husband Ozzy’s drink and drug fuelled excesses, to her own colon cancer.  Similarly, Frank takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the struggles of his life, including the effects of his mental illness.

There are those who suggest that the misery memoir is a new literary genre which began with Frank McCourt’s prize winning Angela’s Ashes. In this book (and subsequent film) he proposed that there is nothing more miserable than a miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Did other writers view this as a challenge and then seek to show that their life was even more miserable? Or are misery memoirs better understood in the wider context of tragic writing through the centuries?

Anyone who has read a novel by the English author Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) knows that misery and tragedy were the subject of literature many years before Angela’s Ashes. Indeed anyone who has seen or read the famous play Oedipus the King by the Greek writer Sophocles (495-405 B.C) knows that tragedy goes back many centuries before that.

Certainly, there seems to be something deep within the human psyche that leads us to tell stories of misery – our own and other people’s.  Even the most upbeat, optimistic and positive person will, given the opportunity, talk of their struggles and pains.

So, is this all that life holds for us? Should we put up with the misery and not expect any restoration or hope? Perhaps the best we can do is just to moan about it. Recently this was illustrated in the television series Grumpy Old Men. As we laughed along with people giving free reign to their rants about anything and everything, perhaps we were learning to be happy in our misery.

This was an approach to life proposed by the French philosopher Albert Camus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. He considered the life of Sisyphus, a character in Greek mythology who upset the gods with his extraordinary wisdom and was sentenced to a meaningless life. For all eternity he had to push a boulder up to the peak of a mountain, from where it would inevitably roll down, requiring him to push it up again. Camus recognized that his life (and, by inference, all of our lives) was a pointless and absurd struggle. But then he quoted the line from the end of Oedipus the King in which Oedipus says that, despite the terrible ordeals and the overwhelming tragedy, ‘all is well’. Camus conludes, ‘The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy’.

There are many who accept Camus’ view that the best we can do is to accept that life is full of misery and woe – and try to be happy with the struggle. But, perhaps they may consider an alternative: that there is the possibility of hope for restoration for our world and our lives.

This was illustrated in the recent film adaptation of CS Lewis’ The Lion the witch and the Wardrobe. In this we see that the land of Narnia is struggling under perpetual winter. But hope is not lost – and the land is transformed through the sacrifice of Aslan.

At a time when many talk about the suffering expressed in misery memoirs, what better than to talk with them about the hope expressed in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe – and, from there to consider whether the tale of Aslan is just a fantasy story, or if he points to the reality of a genuine hope for transformation and new life for all of us through Jesus Christ.

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