Finding Joy in Sorrow
Turns out that the boy looking for the pony in the midst of the mess was onto something much bigger than he, or we, imagine.
My posts have been scant of late as much is going on…a dear friend from overseas and another dear friend visiting us; a dear sister fleeing Tampa on the last flight out of Orlando before Milton made landfall; the joy of seeing that Milton did not wreak as much havoc as it could have; photos of the Northern Lights off our front porch last evening…
All of these, and many more, are motives for gratitude and hope. Yet we so readily lock into the hard news, with our fight-or-flight mechanisms at the ready. Why is that?
Turns out we are hard-wired for it. When survival is the imperative and you don’t know whether that brown lump over there is a small hill or a lion basking in the sun, you hedge your bets, because if you think it’s a hill but it’s really a lion, then you also think you’re a human being but you’re really an hors d’œvre. Caution keeps us alive.
Except when caution is a constant in our life. Then it paralyzes us, blinds us to both beauty and opportunity, and turns life into a sore trial. As a background operation of the amygdala, caution is great. Let it become the primary mode of being and life becomes tedious and hard, and joy seeps away.
We have to admit that joy and sorrow come hand-in-hand. The joy of my sister’s visit was tinged, at first, with the sorrow that a lifetime of work could be erased in the blink of an eye by a weather event. Our dear friend from overseas can stay with us only so long. The Northern Lights will be visible only for a certain length of time. The same event contains joy and sorrow, and when we recognize the sorrowful aspect without letting it dominate, the sorrowful aspect serves to augment the joy. It’s a mystery of life.
The mystery of the Finding in the Temple provides us great material for contemplating joy and sorrow. Realizing after three days’ departure from Jerusalem that Jesus is not with his friends or others in their travel party, Mary and Joseph are frantic looking for the Lord. They find him teaching in the Temple, amazing all who hear the words of one wise well beyond his years, because he is God Incarnate. The same mystery is the Third Joyful Mystery in the Dominican Rosary, the one most Catholics recite, and the Third Sorrowful Mystery in the Servite Rosary, the Rosary of Our Lady of Sorrows. The mystery is sorrowful because Mary experiences the fears and terror of the loss of God, and because Joseph and she know they are responsible for the Son they cannot find. The mystery is joyful because she finds him, and her joy is unbounded.
Yet she experiences sorrow again. Jesus reminds her that God the Father, not Joseph, is his father in the truest sense of the term: at twelve years old, he could be considered a Son of the Commandments as the child of a widow — as a child without an earthly father — and thus authorized to teach, rather than having to wait until his bar mitzvah at age 13. Imagine for a moment the pain she experienced, first for Joseph, who is Jesus’ earthly father without having generated him, and then upon her realization that his earthly ministry is in a sense already beginning, a ministry that she knows will be painful for him and sorrowful for her. The human richness of the commingling of joy and sorrow is staggering. So, too, the realization that Mary always suffers for others and not just for herself alone.
The same experiences can bring us both joy and sorrow. We can experience great sorrow and suffering only to discover later down the line that the suffering and sorrow were ploughing deep furrows in hard soil, furrows that yield a richer harvest than we ever could have imagined. The suffering that is inherent in life is converted, in the economy of grace, into a gateway of joy, for those who choose to take this path.
Some years ago, a good and holy priest taught me to pray, “thank you for this ….problem/temptation/sorrow/aggravation. Thank you for allowing me to suffer with you in this way. I choose not to give into it. I choose to be charitable.” In this way, we imitate Christ, and we imitate Mary, too, as she is his perfect disciple. In this way, we advance in holiness and we advance the salvation of the world.
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