Sadness

The truth is, I am a complete masochist. That's because I love sadness. I'm drawn to tragedy. I love sad movies, sad books, sad music. Recently a movie that I have been positively dying to see is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it is one of the mellowest movies ever made. In it, Jim Carrey is the opposite of a comedian. But sadness and loneliness are things no one should look forward to and shouldn't be seen as fulfilling realities, right?

I recently have read a book called the Wounded Healer by Henri J. M. Nouwen, a man who has, through his ministry, connected with others' intimate weakness, frailty and sadness. He worked on a completely volunteer basis with a society called L'Arche, a community of mentally and physically disabled. He didn't just "treat" them, he lived with them in complete friendship. I heard a sermon directed toward the Village Church titled "Brokenness." It cited scripture many different times about God's love of the broken, the depressed and the lowly. I ran across a verse in Isaiah about God requiring Israel's contriteness of heart for repentance. All of these voices tell me that sadness cannot be avoided, brokenness and heartache are inevitable.

Now that I have stated the obvious, let me now try and say something a little less so. Pain and suffering are a part of God's plan, not apart from it. Tragedy, desperateness, loss and sorrow are part and parcel to experiencing salvation. One of the biggest, fattest false promises that I heard people make is that Christianity rewards its members with an ever-present happiness. The truth is that followers of the Way are faced with two realities, two worlds, a duality that some try to ignore. We have to take two things seriously: that there is a kingdom that is becoming present, and that that same kingdom has not yet arrived. In other words there are two "orders" of things. One is the ordering that we now live with, where things are how they are. Ultimately those things are completely screwed up, disheveled, uproarious and rife with bad intentions and good intentions gone wrong. When I tell people about missions in the Two-Thirds World, decreasing AIDS, eliminating global poverty, maintaining the environment, weeding out tyranny, creating peace in fought out regions, one of the responses that I hear quite often is that "this is the world we live in," "things are the way they are," "be a realist," "it's an imperfect world, deal with it." They think I'm an idealist, someone who hasn't lived long enough or experienced enough to understand the facts of life: that the world is cold and hard and inhospitable and nothing ever changes.

But what is "real" and just "ideal" is a matter of perspective, they come from a particular point of view. And for the Christian there is another point from which we are viewing things, and that is the kingdom that is here yet not here. It's the kingdom of God. Reading over Jesus' words, it is obvious that he was obsessed with this coming kingdom. His stories revolved around it, his blessings all centered on it. Most of all Jesus made this distant, intangible, "ideal," kingdom something near, even intrusive, a reality that couldn't be ignored or discarded.

Now how does this lead at all to why sadness is so necessary, so planned and used by God? Christians must live in the kingdom that Jesus made real, a kingdom that has no rhyme or reason in the current way of things. When we look back and forth from the kingdom of God and the way things "just are the way they are," we must make a choice between them. And both seeing the way things are, and contrasting the difference between them and the kingdom, invite sadness and mourning. If sadness isn't a part of your life you aren't looking to the way things could be, viewing the kingdom, or you just aren't looking at all.

It is only through compassion that we can be saved. The definition of compassion?: To suffer with. Compassion and Jesus Christ go hand in hand; there is no separating them from one another. He shows compassion by suffering with us. Compassion for others is the only way that we can save ourselves. Its not by trying to salvage ourselves from the wrecks and wreckages of our hurts and our wounds that we can be saved, that we can be new. Its only by tossing ourselves in with others' plight that we are free to love anyone, even ourselves. The truth is that Jesus tossed himself with us; just by being who he was he couldn't hold himself aloft. No one can say enough about the Incarnation, about him coming to us. Sorrow is the inviolable effect of the incarnation, sadness was planned, the tool God used that made Jesus the Savior.