Sacred Combinations

Sacred Combinations: Joy and Sorrow           

I have been thinking a lot about how joy and sorrow fit together.  I don’t mean that sorrow overrides joy or that joy dissipates sorrow. Rather, my question has been, “How do they work together?”  Is sorrow the strengthening agent that gives joy its longevity?  Is joy the goal that sorrow presses toward?

The classic book Hinds Feet on High Places describes a scene in which the heroine named Much Afraid discovers sorrow swallowed up in joy. This phrase intrigued me and I pondered what that actually says to us about the nature of these two realities. What I don’t think this means is that sorrow loses its power or that we no longer remember it when we enter a joyful season.  Rather, I believe sorrow is a key ingredient in creating joy.

An analogy came to mind as I reflected on this.  I believe that joy swallows up sorrow in the same way that cake batter, once mixed, swallows up each ingredient in order to create one whole cake.  Take flour, for instance. When you add flour to a bowl of ingredients, it transforms both the flour and the ingredients in the bowl. Once the ingredients become cake batter, you can no longer see the flour or any of the other ingredients anymore, but that does not mean they are not there.  On the contrary, they are absolutely essential to creating the cake itself!  Without flour, there is no batter.

In the same way, in the creation of joy in our lives, a lot of ingredients are added.  Mixed together, in the right amounts, they create something real and beautiful.  Sorrow is one of those ingredients.  It is does not fill the whole bowl, but it is a key part.  With time and mixing in the other meaningful parts of our lives, we can no longer see the sorrow on its own.  It becomes part of the holistic story of our lives.  But, just because we can’t see it or feel it in the same way that we once did, does not mean it is not there.  It is, in fact, a key ingredient in the recipe of our life’s joy.

Sorrow and suffering are not to be sought out.  There is a history within Christianity of well-meaning people elevating suffering as something of great value, something to give oneself to and even create for oneself. This is not the way to joy.  That is called martyrdom or self-flagellation. God does not require this of his children, just as you would not require your own children to purposely create a situation where their hearts will break.

The reality is that we don’t need to seek out suffering anyway because it is ALL around us.  Many of us have enough suffering in our lives caused by others, by systems and by life circumstances to keep our emotions plenty busy.  There are so many things that we cannot control, but what we CAN control is a firm decision within to learn as much from our pain as possible.  We don’t seek out pain, but we do seek out lessons from it. We believe that it will turn out to be a key ingredient in our life’s joy.

Sorrow is a powerful teacher.  The impact of learning from sorrow means that it gets stirred into the bowl as joy is made. Like the flour in a cake batter, it is absorbed into joy, making it rich and embodied and full of substance. Sorrow is truly a key ingredient to true and substantive joy.

May you know the sacred combination of your sorrow working together with joy today.