Emotions, good and "bad"

We tend to think of certain emotions-fear, anger, sadness-as bad. We are told to "think positive", or "Don't be so negative!". One particular quasi-religious empire was built around "positive thinking". Another, more contemporary one, tells us that a different sort of positive thinking combined with meditation will "attract" wonderful things to us, somewhere from the deep recesses of a universe that somehow is both personal and impersonal at the same time.

In any case, the so-called negative emotions are so described because they are unpleasant. No one likes to feel them, unless, I suppose, you're a pain glutton, patterning yourself on Jack Nicholson in The Little Shop of Horrors, but as an emotional, rather than physical, pain junkie.


For the rest of us, though, emotions act as signals. And so they cannot be bad in themselves. They tell us, remind us, to "Avoid this", or that "I'm sorry I lost this". We could no more lose our unpleasant emotions and be fully functioning humans than we could do the same if we lost our pleasant ones, or our reason.

But when we experience that signal, that pain, we want to turn away. We want to shut it down, now. Often this is a perfectly reasonable. So much of what we see on the Internet is designed to work us up to a strong emotional reaction, get a click, drive numbers.


But much of the time, in "real life", that strong reaction indicates there's something here that we need to think about. This is especially true if the reaction is particularly powerful. If someone says something I react to strongly, I must ask myself why this is. Am I really inconsiderate, or too slow to ponder why a given viewpoint angers me? What am I walling myself off from?

In a age of using electronic devices to, in effect, alienate ourselves from what we truly feel and think, it strikes me that these are worthwhile questions.

The Search

Nothing beautiful can be fully understood. Our hearts crave mysterious Truth. So much of the beauty is in the mystery, itself. And so the search continues.

Walker Percy, a member of that interesting category, the Southern Catholic writer, often wrote of the search. Percy is the only author I've ever read who prompted the thought, "This guy thinks like me". I'm not sure if that says much for Percy, in itself, but he was certainly one of the 20th century's finest novelists.

Will Barrett, the protagonist of The Second Coming, is a widower who has reached a point in his depression where he essentially dares God to kill him. God doesn't. Will ends up meeting Allison, a zany mental hospital escapee living in a greenhouse, whose love redeems him. Almost sounds trite to describe, but Percy uses a light touch to show how gratitude can lead to faith.


Percy's books are all about the alienation of modern man, who struggles with, as Arnold Stocker (the Catholic Romanian psychoanalyst) put it, "A false suggestion and a true intuition". The false suggestion, to put it simply, is that what we strive for-career, relationships, wealth, power-are all we need. The world tells modern man this, and in his secularized understanding of his meaning and purpose, he "accepts" it.

The true intuition is the sense that we need more, that the "sensus divinitatis" that Calvin spoke of. It is the instinctive sense each of us has that God is real and our lives are not our own. As CS Lewis wrote,  we desire things, and God provides them-food, sex. Similarly God plants in each of us a desire for Himself, that only He can fulfill.


Our alienation, our anger, comes from the usually unconscious recognition that our strivings, even when achieved, do not really satisfy. How many Hollywood types do we see who have, most improbably, gotten all their wished for-fame and money and power and creative success-who still are miserable?

This world cannot satisfy us.


Much of the above comes from ideas drawn from Swiss physician Paul Tournier's work, such as The Whole Person in a Broken World.