Marvelous Melancholy: A Portrait of a Christian Existentialist
By Eliana Meza-Ehlert (PZ ’25)
If Christ is to come and dwell in me, it will have to be in the manner described in the heading the almanac assigns to the Gospel reading for today: Christ comes in through closed doors. The only Christ Søren knew was the God his father had introduced to him: punitive, legalistic, and distant. In this moment of intense grief, why would he would ever want to open up his raw and battered heart to such a deity?
His tiny knees were pressed against the damp earth, the cold of the cemetery seeping in through the wool, fingers freezing even in the mittens his mother knit for him. With his head bent towards the clovered ground, he grit his teeth to keep them from chattering. A breeze blew through the trees and the leaves rustled, the sound of frantic susurration permeating the foggy clearing. Søren Kierkegaard sneaked a glance at his older brother Peter, seven years his senior, whose body was still in silent prayer. Of course, Søren should have known that even a glance would not go unnoticed.
“Head down and eyes closed,” their father said sharply. “Or have I taught you nothing? You are as I was: distracted by the world, and not surrendering to Him who made you. Mark my words, as it has done with me, God’s wrath will come upon you for your transgressions.”
Snapping his head back down and squeezing his eyes shut, Søren imitated his brother. At least he could do that. Behind his calm facade, the questions tumbled through his mind as they always did. Why did God create me if I only ever get hurt? Why should I even believe in God when he never shows up when I need Him?
This was the world Søren knew: a cold, and desolate place where sinners suffered greatly for their wrongdoings. Repeatedly, Søren’s father had hammered this worldview into his son’s mind, determined to instill his children with the same degree of piety required by God’s chosen. Though he hoped to save his children from the life he experienced, the deep-set melancholia that haunted Søren and defined his early years was forming even then.
As Søren picked up the notebook sitting open on his bedside table, his eyes fell on the last entry to date: April 24. Once again a long time has passed in which I have not been able to pull myself together to do the least thing. Now I must make another little attempt. Poul Møller is dead.
“Poul Møller is dead.”
The words still felt foreign on his tongue. Poul, his beloved mentor, had been dead for half a month now, and Søren had not been able to write anything since then. To worsen the matter, Søren’s grief about Poul was compounded by his mother’s death a few years prior, resulting in pain too strong to bear. The intensity of Søren’s grief dissuaded him from participating in church, leading him to avoid it for the better part of a year. Cut off from his usual outlets for emotional processing, Søren was determined to push everything out of his mind as best he could. Gathering his notebook, he set off into the streets of Copenhagen.
Against the cruel April chill, clouds still heavy with the threat of rain, Søren’s lone figure strode through the lamp-lit streets, attempting to outwalk his restlessness. Had anyone bothered to look out their windows so early in the morning, they would have seen his shock of unruly blond hair and lean figure roaming the cobblestone streets, feet carrying him from one neighborhood to the next, a nomad in his own backyard.
As the sleepy sun began to illuminate the buildings around him, Søren stopped suddenly, finding the growing pressure inside too great to bear. After a moment’s infinity, Søren continued, the lake of silence around him penetrated only by each angry step. Finally, he came to the alcove — his alcove — nestled between two trees. Taking out the journal he always carried from the inner pocket of his coat, he sat down and finally articulated what had been simmering inside since the day he stopped attending church: If Christ is to come and dwell in me, it will have to be in the manner described in the heading the almanac assigns to the Gospel reading for today: Christ comes in through closed doors. The only Christ Søren knew was the God his father had introduced to him: punitive, legalistic, and distant. In this moment of intense grief, why would he ever want to open up his raw and battered heart to such a deity?
Why does one continue on when they are so alone in this world? The question echoed in Søren’s mind a few weeks after his stormy declaration to God that his heart was completely closed off. Søren’s feet took him along the same path they always did as he pondered, curving through the streets of Copenhagen, past the still-shuttered homes and soon-to-open shops.
As he neared the storefronts, Fru Lykke, a baker, stepped through the door, broom in hand. Her face lit up with an affectionate smile when she spotted Søren’s blundering figure in the distance. Ignoring the suffocating weight of his thoughts, Søren performed the grin and wit that his acquaintances had come to expect. Fru Lykke’s booming laugh filled his ears, and the longing to be someone he was not, to shed the feelings of loss and frustration that had become the markers of his life, nearly overcame him. For the briefest of moments, Søren pushed those feelings into the furthest corner of his mind, pretending that he was the person whom he presented to the world. But as he continued along the winding pathways that had come to define his daily rhythm, the feelings resurfaced, hydralike in force. What was life but a collection of futile moments? He toiled over texts, and books, attending lectures and taking in the world around him. He found Meaning, only to have it crumble immediately, unable to carry the crushing weight of reality.
Today though, something was different. Instead of endlessly questioning and bemoaning the lack of Meaning in his life, Søren simply walked. Inexplicably a feeling began to unfold, suffusing him with warmth. It should not have been possible, and yet there was no denying how his fettered chest loosed, how his buffeted soul rested, and how he finally, finally, breathed. He walked past the tea house he had frequented with Poul Møller (where their discussions often led him to lose track of time); past the towering spires of the university library, argosies of life and love. And there, just past the inn, was the avenue his mother had dragged him along so many mornings during his childhood. He blinked twice, quickly, as though seeing it for the first time. How had he forgotten? Søren found himself hastening his steps, nearly running by the time he reached his destination, the oft-visited alcove.
Søren took out his journal, uncapped his pen, and wrote. Slowly at first then all at once, the words rushing through his mind almost too quickly for him to capture:
There is an indescribable joy that glows within us just as inexplicably as the unmotivated outburst by the Apostle: ‘Rejoice, and again I say, rejoice’ (Philippians 4:4). This is not joy about one or another thing but is the full-throated shout of the soul ‘with tongue and mouth from the bottom of the heart’
Settling back against the cool stone of the alcove, Søren paused for a moment, allowing himself a soft smile. Though unsure about what it was that he had just experienced, he could not deny that the feeling was incomprehensibly, undeniably, linked to the love of Christ.
‘I rejoice for my joy — from, with, by, upon, for and with my joy’ — a heavenly refrain that suddenly interrupts all our other songs, as it were; a joy that cools and refreshes like a breath of wind, a gust from the trade wind that blows from the grove of Mamre to the eternal dwelling places. May 19.
Though it went against all logic, Søren felt, for the first time, as though his life had truly changed. He realized that this only was the beginning of his walk in faith, but felt undaunted by that revelation.
Years later, Søren still walked every morning. But now his greetings to Fru Lykke and all the rest were born out of sincerity. Surrendering himself to God hadn’t been immediate — and he knew profoundly that it would never be complete — but day by day, hour by hour, he was learning to lay down that which troubled him most: his somber ruminations, his anxieties of the past, present, and future, and that feeling of powerless heaviness.
Some days were more difficult than others; sometimes despair still choked. His recently-broken engagement with Regine Olsen had left him tattered, unable to bring himself to do much of anything, except to document the following feelings a few days prior: Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both.
Today though, as he sat in the alcove of cool stone nestled between those two trees, the remembrance of things past and the sting of grief felt, if not cured, then soothed. As he rested in contemplative silence, a prayer strained from his heart, as they often now did. Uncapping his pen, Søren wrote.
Thou loving Father, everything goes wrong for me and yet Thou art love. I have even failed in holding fast to this–that Thou art love, and yet Thou art love. When we wake up in the morning and turn our soul toward Thee–Thou art the first–Thou hast loved us first; if I rise at dawn and at the same second turn my soul toward Thee in prayer, Thou art there ahead of me, Thou hast loved me first.
