For an assembly of young men and maidens in the first rapturous dawn of maturing youth to sing—
"O Paradise, O Paradise,
'Tis weary waiting here,"
though delightfully pessimistic, does not seem quite up to the standard of absolute truth.
These sorrows, these labours, these tears, this weary waiting, represent the experiences in store for the initiate, and the conditions under which the Christian must progress who would reach the goal of his dearest aspirations.
"Death is self-surrender; all loss is a kind of death; the only-begotten Son is the summing up of what is dearest, most one's own—i.e., God can only be at one with his work, can only make it to be truly his work by eternally dying—sacrificing what is dearest to him. God does not, therefore, cease to be; he does not annihilate himself; he lives eternally in the very process of sacrificing his dearest work. Hence God is said to be love; for love is the consciousness of survival in the act of self-surrender.... Such would be the atonement of the world-god eternally living in his own death, eternally losing, and eternally returning to, himself" (Nettleship).
It cannot be denied that "suffering" was the burden of Gotama's song, the refrain of his passionless, yet beautiful, utterances.
Jesus has been described "as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief."
Jesus wept.