In my previous post, on Wendell Berry and his tragic imagination, one of the quotations I considered using but left out was from Berry’s interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell in 1992, in which she asked him to comment on his essay “Writer and Region.” She asked him, “What is the importance of the tragic sensibility in both personal and community life?” Berry answered,

The tragic sensibility simply accepts mortality as an inescapable condition. In a sense, it is the necessary counterbalance to the tradition of seeing the other as a living soul; it applies a sense of time and finitude to our relationships. The tragic sensibility sees and accepts that as we live we are going to live into the deaths of people we love and it accepts that the condition of our love for those people is that we will lose them—or that they will lose us. The practical aspect of the tragic sensibility is that it infuses both a necessary seriousness and a joyful appreciation. (Conversations with Wendell Berry, 2007, p. 56)

Reading this passage reminded me of the Jon Foreman song, “Terminal”:

We are the living souls
With terminal hearts, terminal parts
Flickering like candles, shimmering like candles
We're fatally flawed, in the image of God

What Berry and Foreman are both saying is that we need to recognize in each and every person that they are simultaneously worthy of dignity and love (on account of having a living soul made in the image of God) and deserving of pity and forbearance (on account of being fallen and finite).

In fact, on further reflection, “Terminal” is a great song for illustrating the tragic imagination/sensibility at work:

Whenever I start cursing at the traffic or the phone
I remind myself that we have all got cancer in our bones
Don’t yell at the dead, show a little respect
It’s terminal