I loathe platitudes.
I blame this in part on the three threads of my identity as writer, scholar, and professor. In all three of these occupations I strive for creativity, for sharing old sentiments in fresh new ways. I urge my students to write something new and thoughtful rather than get mired in generalizations and old tropes.
But I also have a special irritation for platitudes because of how we deploy them.
Most of us have witnessed or experienced them: a cheery “I’m sure God has a reason” or “let go, let God” or “she’s in a better place” spoken at the wrong time in the wrong context. Hearing them sets my teeth on edge. And I think it’s no surprise that these sorts of comments come up often in critiques of Christianity.
Used carelessly, platitudes further lacerate wounds of grief and anxiety. In a time when those who are suffering crave understanding, empathy, and presence, a thoughtless platitude can seem flippant, dismissive or outright shallow—a shortcut meant to cut lamentation short, to refuse mourning and pain to air itself fully.
When my mother died, a well-meaning friend patted my shoulder and said, “Don’t weep, honey. She’s with the angels now.”
Setting aside the questionable theological implications, the phrase offered no comfort whatsoever. Not because I didn’t believe my mother was with God: I did and do. But her being there, released from her pain, does not automatically blunt the sense of loss and grief we feel down here. If Jesus Himself wept, we surely have the right to experience our own sorrows in fullness.
But here’s the interesting thing about platitudes: they weren’t always platitudes.
One of my favorite examples is the phrase “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” To our modern ears, this is a phrase so generic, so oft-repeated and familiar to popular culture, that to say it is scarcely better than saying nothing at all. Share this with a brokenhearted person who’s just gotten dumped or someone in the depths of bereavement and you’re not likely to receive a positive response.
But the line became a platitude over years of over-quoting and over-use. At its origin, and where it emerged, the line isn’t a platitude at all. It comes from the Alfred Tennyson poem In Memoriam, published in 1850. At a whopping 133 cantos, In Memoriam is a staggering poem. Tennyson began it in 1833, after the untimely death of a beloved friend, and the poem serves in many ways as both a tribute to his lost friend and a working-out of deep grief.
So in this case, the platitude “better to have loved and lost” isn’t actually a generic, empty phrase of comfort, but the hard-won realization of man who clearly spent a seventeen-year span thinking, writing, and working through the revelations, grief, and sorrow prompted by the death of a beloved person. What saves the phrase from being a platitude is the context: this poem, and that memorable line within it, are borne of a painful mourning that absolutely understands what it means to “have lost.”
This also points us back to why platitudes are so painful.
Often, we use them as a panacea divorced from context: here, feel better, here are some hopeful words. Please stop crying. Platitudes emerge as a desire to somehow cure grief and pain, not as a willingness to enter into it. They strike the suffering, frequently, as being inaccurate to the sorrow of the moment. And that’s because no real empathy-of-the-moment accompanies them.
Interestingly, since my mother’s death, I have learned that many of the irritating platitudes are true.
Yes, the pain fades with time. Yes, I take comfort in knowing we both belong to Christ. Yes, God has been present with me. In the end, no, it was not more than I could bear. But I had to learn those things over a two-year span of jagged ups and downs. They came to me as truth slowly, over time, as I was able to understand them. No amount of being told these things, when I was standing next to her coffin, would have made a difference.
For that reason, despite my own knowledge of these things as true, I shy away from platitudes in my own life where I can. Mostly, I listen. I sit with people. I say things like “I understand” or “I hear you” or “This is heartbreaking; I’m so sorry.” I cry with them sometimes. I handle practical tasks sometimes.
Most people, I have learned, don’t even want words. They want a witness to their suffering.
So it’s only later on, down the road—if I sense they would be amenable—that I try, and I still don’t turn directly to the platitudes. I say, instead, “You know, that whole ‘better to have loved and lost’ thing sounds really trite, but Tennyson went through it.” And I recommend the poem. Or, rather than offer up a vague generalization about who God is or what God is like, I find Scriptures that focus both on lament and comfort. I sometimes say, “I don’t know what you experience will be. Mine was…”
To be there is the critical thing. To be present and bear witness.
Yes, we all know truths as Christians that ease the pain. But the right time and the right place to share such things are often not during seasons of deep lament and sorrow. Sometimes, the most healing thing we can do is sit through the hurt with someone as they work through the grief to a place where they start to recognize these truths for themselves.
Certainly we have food for the journey, but we must also bear each other up on it. Let’s not rely on words out of context to do the work for us.
Samaritan's Song 