Living in "the Tragic Gap"
Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis
Below is an expanded version of words I spoke as a message at our local Quaker meeting a couiple weeks ago. For those not familiar with unprogrammed Quaker meeting, messages (“vocal ministry”) arise spontaneously, in response to the movement of the Spirit and in the moment. Our meetings for worship are therefore quite unpredictable, but in general, we hear are apt to hear between four and eight messages over the course of an hour, interspersed with longer periods of silence.
To set the scene: the first message was from a man who alluded to the lyrics of John Lennon’s Imagine (as he often does) to express his deep yearning for a better world, a world without war:
Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.
Imagine all the people, living life in peace.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. . .
The second message, a few minutes later, was from our resident Buddhist-Quaker, who expressed the view (as he often does) that all our suffering comes from not accepting reality as it is. We need to accept what the past has given us, and not spend energy wishing the past, and therefore the present, to be different than what it is. To dream of something different only leads to more suffering.
The dissonance between these two messages was striking—yet both seemed to contain some truth. I had come to worship with no intention of speaking, but slowly, as sometimes happens, words began to take shape. After some time, I spoke (though now, with the leisure to reflect and write, I have elaborated, quoted, and added references—footnotes are not usually part of vocal minstry!):
The messages this morning have brought to mind words from the Quaker writer and activist Parker Palmer, who says that we are called to “live in the tragic gap,” the gap between what is and what should (or could) be, between our reality and our aspirations.[1] It is tragic not just because it is sad, though it is that, but in the classical sense of tragedy as “an eternal and inescapable feature of our human condition.” He writes:
“Of all the tensions we must hold in personal and political life, perhaps the most fundamental and most challenging is standing and acting with hope in the “tragic gap.” On one side of that gap, we see the hard realities of the world, realities that can crush our spirits and defeat our hopes. On the other side of that gap, we see real-world possibilities, life as we know it could be, because we have seen it that way. We see a world at war, but we have known moments of peace. We see racial and religious enmity, but we have known moments of unity. We see suffering caused by unjust scarcities, but we have known moments of material and spiritual sharing in which abundance was generated. Possibilities of this sort are not wishful dreams or fantasies: they are alternative realities that we have witnessed in our own lives.”[2]
It is hard to live in this gap; we desperately want to escape the tension, and so too often we “fall” to one side or the other. On one side is “corrosive cynicism,” which says the world will never change, nothing we do will ever make a difference, everything is broken beyond repair. On the other side, we can fall into “irrelevant idealism,” floating above the fray, in a fantasy world that is detached from the world as it is. Although cynicism and idealism might seem to be polar opposites, they have this in common: they both take us “out of the gap and out of the action, out of those places we might make a life-giving contribution if only we knew how to hold the tension.”[3]
Life lived in the tragic gap requires faith; Palmer writes that here the metric of success is not effectiveness, but faithfulness.[4]
Living in the tragic gap also requires hope, which nowadays can be in short supply. Hope is not the same as optimism--naively assuming that everything will somehow turn out okay, which ends up only reinforcing the status quo. Hope, as Norman Wirzba has pointed out, is not a thing that we can possess, not a shield or a security blanket, “not like a vaccine that renders people immune to suffering.”[5] Rather, hope is a verb: it wants to be active. Hope, like love, is something we do. Hope in this sense is radical hope: seeing with clear eyes the world as it is, but also with the vision to see what could be, where “every kindness large or slight, shifts the balance toward the light.”[6]
Finally, living in the tragic gap requires wisdom—the “wisdom to know the difference”:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things which should be changed,
And wisdom to know the difference.–Attributed to Reinhold Neibuhr
[1] Parker Palmer, “The Broken-Open Heart: Living with Faith and Hope in the Tragic Gap.” Weavings, XXIV: 2 (2009), 1-12.
[2] Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy (Jossey-Bass, 2011), 191.
[3] Palmer, “The Broken-Open Heart,” 8-9.
[4] Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy, 193.
[5] Noman Wirzba, Loves Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis (Yale, 2024), 16.
[6] Carrie Newcomer, “Lean in Toward the Light.”