The other day I was at lunch with two friends, both of whom said how overwhelmed they felt by all the suffering and injustice they’ve been seeing in the news. The next morning, I read an email from another friend who shared a similar feeling, like his hair was on fire.
I often tell my students that despite living at a time when human suffering is at the lowest rate it’s ever been (as measured by things like poverty and preventable illness), they’re coming to age at a time when human suffering is more visible than it’s ever been. You can’t spend more than a few minutes on any social media platform before a random injustice plays in first-person video. And every one of them sounds the alarm with a call to action.
The constant encounter—remote but emotionally potent—with such suffering is bad enough. But the overwhelm is that there’s too much of it for any one of us to do something about. It’s not just the suffering, but the feeling of powerlessness in the face of it. Times are rough out there for the helpers.
With this on my mind, it was early one morning that a phrase emerged from my memory, one that spoke a new idea to me:
“The tether and the pang of the particular.”
The children’s author and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis coined this phrase, using it most beautifully in his poem called “Scazons.” He describes a tearful moment walking past a cottage that reminded him of friends long dead that he’d walked with there long ago. Even though time had carried on, the stab of loss remained.
In this thought, Lewis considers that the angels seemed to enjoy an indifferent kind of love, a “cold flame.” As for us, he prayerfully laments, “Thou gav’st man the tether and pang of the particular.”
By “tether” he means something like a leash, fixing us to a spot in time and space. The “pang” is the heart’s desire for something that we, being tethered, cannot reach. This is our lot, the price we pay as mere mortals who love.
I’d previously heard this phrase and took it to mean that we live this life tethered to a fallen world with our sights set on heaven. I don’t think it’s a wrong idea, but I don’t think it’s what Lewis meant in his poem. I’d been ignoring what he meant by the “particular.”
When we love, we love a particular someone. When we see suffering, we see particular suffering. When we bristle at injustice, we bristle at particular injustice. The concept of love doesn’t ignite us, just like suffering and injustice as principles don’t offend us. It’s the particular moments and people that invoke the pang.
This is why digital media has so deeply altered the landscape of human experience. Even if only for the length of an Instagram reel, we’re there with a real person as they tell us about the stranger who hurled a slur at them. Before smartphones, all sorts of particular, cruel moments were far from view. Now they’re literally in our pockets. Cruelty at our fingertips!
Our limits are particular, too. As much as I might want to cure a friend’s cancer (or more accurately, banish it to hell), the ability to do it is beyond me. Instead, the reach of my tether can get me as far as acts of friendship and prayers for them. It’s moments like these when I feel especially impotent in my professional skill, the giving of college lectures. Even my most magnificent days of class never came close to curing someone’s cancer.
Now what?
Well, the tether’s not going anywhere. Whether it was an indifferent universe or a loving God that leashed us into our present circumstances, we’re fixed to our place in the world. We do strain at the leash, especially when the pang is strongest for the people we love most. There have also been the remarkable among us who figured out how to stretch their tether heroically. I’m inspired by them, as I’m sure you are, too.
But consider that it’s in the tug against our limits that our character grows and that we learn to value the good things within our reach. Maybe the leash isn’t all bad.
The cold flame is tempting, on the other hand. If it means that we no longer feel small or powerless, why not chill our own heart? If we never feel the call to do something or be somewhere we can’t, then we will never even tug at our limits. Sadly, the circle of reach we’d make for ourselves would be smaller even than our tether’s circumference. We’d self-impose a smaller life.
Because we are constrained by things like time, place, and ability, we have to choose: Do we love and suffer the pang, or do we abandon love for the “cold flame”?
Imagine a world without love. Suffering wouldn’t stop, but would certainly get worse. There’s a reason we can’t even imagine a love that’s abstract, where the particulars have no meaning. It’s an idea that makes love meaningless, because love and compassion only make sense in the particulars. Loving means loving someone,so we love despite the pang. The alternative is simply worse.
All of this is why local and collective action is, and will always be, the most potent way to help. Less sharing web posts indignantly and more staffing volunteer posts cheerfully. We tell our students at BYU to organize their efforts by their affinity and proximity. Surely someone within your circumference could use your help.
Is there really any comfort in understanding the tether and the pang of the particular? There is some for me, at the very least in assuaging my guilt over my very short leash. The pang remains, though, so there’s not nearly as much comfort as I’d prefer.
This is why Lewis ends his poem with the perfect thought. He realizes that our “particular” circumstances make us more like the Divine, but with a cost. Lewis concludes:
“Gods are we, Thou hast said; and we pay dearly.”
