In the past, the belief in heaven helped most Americans deal with this grief of anticipation, because whoever they lost, they would see again. But more and more Americans–and the world generally–are indoctrinated in the creed of Materialism, or what I read is now more often called Physicalism.
To love deeply is to be hurt deeply, so why not make your relationships more superficial, and your lasting attachments to abstractions who will never leave you?
I look at our kids today, and at my own childhood not so very long ago, and I think many American kids bear subtle scars of having been loved a bit, but not enough. Their parents were distracted by work, by media. Quite possibly their mother worked full time and they were raised by care-givers who were not family and not able to care quite enough in the first two years. Quite likely their parents divorced when they were young, each seeking some new adventure, or at least escape from an inability to mature into a healthy giving and receiving relationship.
I was struck many years ago by how much more mature kids in Europe seemed to be than American kids of the same age. Partly it is the real demands placed on them by the school systems over there. Partly it is the continuity of culture and expectation which is communicated person to person, parent and grandparent to child, and not socialization through television.
We did not used to be overgrown children. Americans were as mature and able at the same ages as Europeans. But the 1960’s happened, and somewhere in there the ideal of becoming an adult underwent a crisis and psychosis, and permanently weakened.
And the core of maturation is individuation, and the core of that is the development of a felt sense of personal agency, that your world is in important respects within your control, that your behavior dictates your future, that you have a say, and that even if dreams take time to manifest, that persistence prevails most of the time.
None of those core personality beliefs and attributes can manifest in conditions of continual protection from psychological randomness and difficulty. Life inherently becomes something beyond control, something dark and dangerous, something fearful, and life in a cage–to be called a “sanctuary”–something to be treasured.
I do not feel today as I felt yesterday. But I needed to let that energy out. I am tempted to stipulate as a general principle that if something is falling, let it fall. Then allow something new and more robust to be planted and to grow where it stood. No use protecting dead wood. This is not how life–which is inherently wild when lived honestly and freely–works.