What do you get from loss? (Stephen Colbert)

A divine punishment is also a divine gift.

--J.R.R. Tolkien,

October 1958

    There was a big break in the cable of my life at their death. I was personally shattered. And then you kind of reform yourself in this quiet, grieving world that has taken over the house.

    We’re asked to accept the world God gives us, and to accept it with love, with gratitude.

    It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that. And I guess I’m either a Catholic or a Buddhist when I say those things… I didn’t learn that I was grateful for the thing I most wish hadn’t happened as that I realized it, and it’s an oddly guilty feeling. I don’t want it to have happened; I want it not to have happened. But if you are grateful for your life, which is a positive thing to do… then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and chose what you’re grateful for.

   And what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people’s loss, which allows you to connect with that other person, which allows you to love more deeply and to understand what it’s like to be a human person, if it’s true that all humans suffer. And so, at a young age I suffered something, so that by the time that I was in serious relationships in my life… I [had] some understanding that everybody is suffering, and, however imperfectly, acknowledge their suffering and to connect with them and to love them in a deep way that, not only accepts that all of us suffer, but that somehow makes you grateful for the fact that you have suffered, so that you can know that about other people. It’s about the fullness of your humanity. What’s the point of your being human if you can’t be the most human you can be? I’m not saying best… I want to be the most human I can be. And that involves acknowledging and ultimately being grateful for the things that I wish didn’t happen, because they gave me a gift.

    And in my tradition, that’s the great gift of the sacrifice of Christ, is that God does it, too. So, you’re really not alone: God does it, too.

--Stephen Colbert, in an interview with Anderson Cooper

To watch this interview in which Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper discuss grief, click on the video below:

In November we remember All Souls...

Image source:  https://vocal.media/poets/broken-chains-1
Tolkien quotation source
Video source (Note: The majority of the Colbert quotation starts around 13:00.)