Lights! Camera! Tears!

A little restraint, please

Let's hear it for the stiff upper lip and dignified restraint in public displays of grief. The British royals took an unfair beating when they were criticized for their insufficient mourning of Diana's shocking death.

These complaints, along with the massive outpourings of sorrow for Diana, point to certain shifts in our Western culture. It appears that it is no longer enough to engage in rituals devised to help us poor mortals mourn. Appropriately enough for Diana, there were flower bouquets, mash notes, pop music tributes, and teddy bears to complement more traditional rites; a wave of tossed flowers and clapping accompanied her cortege to her island burial place.

We do continue to say it with flowers and employ the sound of music, as well as bodily gestures and ancient scriptures. Good enough. But now we insist that mourners weep on camera - so that everyone can see how sensitively they are responding and how deeply they care? Bill Clinton's hair-trigger threshold for tears and instantaneous sentimental effusions have become the new standard for public grieving.

Is there no better way? Recently I was impressed by a speech which one of the great early physicians, William Osier (1849-1919), regularly delivered to his Johns Hopkins medical students. He took as his topic a discourse on equanimity, or aequanimitas and said to his (all-male) audience, "Cultivate, gentlemen, such a judicious measure of obtuseness as will enable you to meet the exigencies of practice with firmness and courage, without, at the same time, hardening 'the human heart by which we live'" (see, The Healer's Calling: A Spirituality for Physicians and Other HealthCare Professionals by Daniel P. Sulmasy, O.F.M., M.D., Paulist Press).

Osler's purpose in recommending composure was not to encourage icy detachment but to point out that true commitment to the well-being of one's patients requires a physician to keep calm when facing adversity and crises. In emergencies, true beneficence means coping courageously, no matter how disturbed you feel. Otherwise you may end up following that humorous but dangerous maxim, "When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." Since emotions are contagious, displays of panic, fear, and despair can produce routs or riots.

Hearts need not be castigated as hard just because they choose to break behind closed doors in private moments. Does grief exist only if it is seen to exist trumpeting and crying out in the marketplace and media? I'd say that it remains the case that still waters run deep and shallow brooks babble noisily.

Here I am not making a plea for any form of neostoic aloofness from all-entangling human bonds. Nor can we approve the numbing of emotions that affects so many robotic modern types, mostly males, I'm afraid, depersonalized by fixations on technology. A style marked by perpetual pompous gravitas is either an affliction or an affectation. Humorlessness should never be equated with competence.

No, I believe that all wholly developed persons must be gifted with the full range of nuanced feelings, from light and blithe to dark and deeply passionate. Think of Christ being moved by joy, pity, anger, affection, sorrow, love, and even the kind of dread that sweats blood. How wrong Augustine was to claim that Christ only "accepted those emotions in his human mind for the sake of his fixed providential design when he so decided." Truly human persons have hearts that do not decide when to feel appropriate emotions, any more than they decide to accept the pumping of blood to deliver oxygen.

I also know from psychological research that being able to acknowledge and express the emotions that one has is important for mental and physical health. Having emotionally charged secrets, usually dark secrets, and never disclosing them to anyone can be damaging to a person's functioning. In recent experiments it was found that college students who, for the first time, disclosed in writing those secrets that they had never told anyone before, visited the health-care service less often then a control group. Perhaps the fact that such persons never had a friend they could trust enough to confide in was the source of the problem.

But there is a time and place for everything. I don't watch much TV, but when I accidentally got a glimpse of a certain talk show I could only blush with shame and quickly turn off the set. Oddly enough, you can feel vicarious shame for people who don't know enough to be ashamed of themselves. Orgies of expressive public display must be like sexual promiscuity in drying up the deep wellsprings of private feeling.

"Judicious obtuseness" may also be necessary for a morally committed life. Many women, for instance (mea culpa), can be so supersensitive to the slightest emotional emanation of distress or disapproval from others that they can hardly engage in disagreement or conflict. In the name of peace, they shrink from necessary confrontations.

Somehow, we have to get ourselves and our culture into a more balanced mode when it comes to feeling and displays of emotion. Too suppressed and stoically chilly and you become an autistic automaton vulnerable to disease. Too loosely tied together and you become banal. Like little bear's porridge, public behavior should be neither too hot nor too cold, but just right; especially when it comes to grief and mourning in the tragic loss of a youthful beauty such as Diana's.

In a poem Gerard Manley Hopkins addressed to a sensitive, young child who is distressed at the loss of beautiful leaves in the fall, he sadly and shrewdly diagnoses the human condition:

Margaret are you grieving Over goldengrove unleaving?... Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder... Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow's springs are the same... It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.