On the Nature of Sadness
Upon finally waking from a night of restless sleep, I noticed at once how untidy my thoughts were. There were a thousand little matters I had previously left unattended; from, say, the obfuscations of post-modern ontology to the brilliance of Charles Bukowski. Like Christmas morning children, these scattered musings woke before their parents and scrambled carelessly from one end of the house to the other, sliding along on the wooden floors in their socks, tumbling around laughing, crashing into the refrigerator occasionally, forcing the day into motion. And inevitably, the reckless playing causes their parents to awaken. So here I am, writing at 3:35am.
Amidst the Christmas morning memories and absinthe dreams, was one particular thought that remained persistently troublesome: the insoluble necessity of sadness. As today is Tenebrae (the day of shadows), there is really no more appropriate time to discuss the sadness and uncertainty which lingers within each of us.
We are painfully aware that most of us are simply a crowd of pessimistic masochists masquerading as joyful spectators. It is a concealed reality but a true one. What else could be expected of us? We are thrown into this world with little idea of how to be human, much less how to avoid sadness–or why indeed we possess the inexorable drive to avoid it at all. Here, I must confess that for a brief moment I had the temptation to search for a definition of sadness in the pages of a lexicon, but you know as well as I that sadness can no more be defined by technical denotational effort than the exquisite taste of a bourbon barrel-aged gin can be described by the constituents of its recipe and process. That will hardly do.
What then is sadness? We know it, you and I. It is the feeling that captures one when they look upon a child whose laughter suddenly turns to wailing, or the face of a loved one looking down into a grave. It is that which haunts us when we feel immutably lonely. To be sad is the absolutely intransigent sensation one contracts when a day turns to mud, not the mud of a toddler who bakes it into pies, but the overwhelming bleakness of mud that unexplainably sets in upon the happiest days. There is a melancholy chorus singing softly in our bones. It colonizes our lives, invades our shelters, and similarly to most conquerors, refuses to depart. And it is provoked by even the simplest of contemplations: the regret of an unchangeable past, or the remembrance of a future one will never possess. What does this great sadness mean for us?
Perhaps that is the wrong question to ask, however. Although we are all sad intermittently and have many pockets full of empty wishes and dreams squandered, perhaps the question we have been asking is wrong; or not wrong, but not quite right. I come from the tradition of Jesus. And from the greatest writers in this tradition, from Augustine to George Macdonald, we receive one ineluctable thought about evil, suffering, and sadness. For these authors, evil does not “exist” in the proper sense. Suffering is the steresis agathou, the privatio boni, the privation of the good — that is, it has no substance of its own and can only derive its (malformed) being from the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Evil is like blindness says Augustine; blindness does not exist, it is the total absence of something (sight), a pure contingency, and has no existence at all. Or like a shadow, the absence of light. Without doubt, suffering is a powerful “reality”, but it is hardly ultimate reality, nor a reality God ever intended his creation to experience. The question, What does sadness mean for us? fails because sadness — like suffering and evil — doesn’t mean anything. It is, by its very nature, a vacuous absurdity. This does not, of course, mean that God cannot work good out of a dreadful reality, hence why tragedy is so formative. But your sadness, dread, and sorrow is not part of some univocal divine decree or some mysterious plan. For this tradition, suffering and evil will be judged and done away with by God, being seen finally to have no power at all. At this time, every tear will be wiped and everything will become new.
However, I doubt we have come closer to an antidote for our present sadness (and by no means am I supposing I can give an irrefragable solution to the quandary). I hope only to share a handful of observations — the first and last to which I will cling.
Tolkien wrote that it is possible for pain and delight to flow together and become the very wine of blessedness. There are days I believe such a thing. Other times, I wonder with Steinbeck whether joy may come later, like maturity and muscle, as if in a mad race with death, and sometimes isn’t in time.
However, given that sadness is a conquered reality with its own being derived parasitically, we can be open to, if only like an unwanted guest, allowing it in. Perhaps more than that though. Grief is not wanted, but she is Love’s child and her mother loves her. Most of our griefs are indebted to our love, are they not? As such, she should be a welcomed traveler despite our knowing she will not stay for long. The more we hang our sorrow in the noose and choke it out, the more we too will die. But it is only my confidence in the conquering of this disease that allows me to accept it as all part of this great story; sadness has been defeated, and therefore is to be welcomed.
Let me end with a story that has been deep in my bones for as long as I remember. I have no intention of allowing the invocation of the following tale to act as a religious imperative for conversion. Rather, I am fond of the subsequent narrative for its rugged minimalism, cultural subversion, human honesty, and childish audacity. Quite simply, it is a story I like and so I am going to tell it.
There is a renowned story of Jesus whereupon the death of one of his dear friends, he weeps (Jn. 11:35). What is provocative is not that the one who claims to be God — in his hypostatic nature — can experience sorrow. What is compelling to me is that this is not the weeping of one who has no hope; it is not the secret of a hidden sorrow revealed only in the quieted heaves of one who believes it impossible that the sun will blaze in the heavens the next morning. The lachryma Christi is quite miraculous in that this grief is not antagonistic to hope; in contrast, it is somehow mysteriously intertwined with joyful confidence. Holding hands with his misery and loss is this profoundly indefatigable hope — the knowledge that he is within just a moment going to invite his friend out of the tomb to join the merriment once more. Jesus cries anyways. So this sadness does not conquer, it does not boast, it does not win. There is no glory in this grief, no pride in this suffering. Gloom in the finality of history shall become jubilance. Yet the pain is present and he does nothing to shove it down or destroy it. He does not call a legion of angels, nor apologetically dispose of his weeping as an embarrassing frivolity. Jesus feels his pain, invites it in, and anticipates the ever-coming resurrection.
And perhaps so should we.
