Advent 2024: Joy
The Sharing of Sorrows
The Advent / Christmas season is supposedly “the most wonderful time of the year,” full of “joy, peace, love, cheer.” The “holiday season” may be full of all sorts of emotions, but joy reigns supreme.
December is the month of joy. I believed this a child. I believed it as an adult. I believed it until 2017, when, five days before Christmas, my wife and I lost our firstborn son, Emerson. Now December is the month of darkness.
What does joy look like after losing a child? What does joy look like in the midst of suffering? How can one experience joy after trauma, violence, pain?
Anxiety weighs down the human heart,
but a good word cheers it up.
Proverbs 12:25
Our culture imagines joy to be in opposition to sorrow and pain. To achieve joy, a person must banish sorrow: ignore it, repress it, overcome it. If any sorrow appears, it will tarnish the joy.
I’ve even heard pastors at some churches announce, “Leave your anxieties and your sorrows at the door; while we’re here in church, we will rejoice in the Lord!” Is this hospitality or does it mask the church’s discomfort with sorrow?
Like one who takes off a garment on a cold day,
like vinegar on a wound,
is one who sings songs to a heavy heart.
Proverbs 25:20
If you’ve read my posts on hope and peace, you can probably guess where this post is headed.
True joy doesn’t come from hiding sorrow away or denying that it exists or ignoring its calls from within. True joy acknowledges sorrow and suffering. True joy emerges with and from our sorrows. But how?
Sorrow as Something to Share
Several years ago, my ministry interns led a devotional on Psalm 88. This psalm is not a joyous one. It is the prayer of someone “like those forsaken among the dead” (88:5). Unlike most psalms, which end in hope or deliverance, this psalm ends in darkness. The last line of the Hebrew is difficult to translate (there are many different English translations). The NIV has it: “Darkness is my only friend” (88:18).
After we had discussed the text, one of my interns asked, “What if darkness is my only friend, and darkness is your only friend—does that make darkness our mutual friend?” If so, could it introduce us? Could it be that sorrow shared could create relationship, friendship, dare I say joy?
In Genesis 3, the first two people (Adam and Eve) eat the fruit of the tree God has forbidden them to eat. As a result, they face mortality and other consequences. Below is my translation of what God says to the woman and to the man:
To the woman (Genesis 3:16): “I will greatly increase your toil ('itzavon) in pregnancy; in toil ('etzev) you will bear children.”
To the man (Genesis 3:17): “Cursed is the ground because of you. In toil ('itzavon) you will eat of it all the days of your life.”
The three words I have rendered “toil” are translated by the King James Version as “sorrow”; the ESV translates them all as “pain.” The terms 'itzavon and 'etzev share the same root. The man and woman, though they receive distinct declarations from God, are united by the word for pain. They are to be joined together in their sorrow. Sorrow is a relational binding agent.
Side Note on Different “Levels” of Suffering
Notice how “toil” appears twice in the pronouncement to Eve. We probably can't say that, mathematically, Eve receives double the pain as Adam. However, the repetition communicates, at the very least, that people receive different portions of pain. Despite this, they can still be joined in solidarity.
Losing my son is the worst pain I have ever experienced. It is a pain that is with me still. I’ve heard that losing a child or losing a spouse are the worst kinds of bereavement. I believe it; I've lived one of those. But we have a tendency to compare and rank pain. Is my pain worse than [fill in the blank]?
In the early years of grief, I felt no sympathy for people crying that their pet died. I didn’t care if it was “one of the family.” It was nothing compared to losing a child. But what’s worse: being estranged from one’s child or losing a pet? Having a parent in prison or being physically abused? Going hungry or becoming incredibly sick? We can’t judge between these. We can only measure pain by our own threshold of experience.
The heart knows its own bitterness,
and no stranger shares its joy.
Proverbs 14:10
Pain is isolating, because only we can feel our own pain. Yet pain is universal: we all feel pain.
Edmond Jabés, in The Book of Questions, writes a dialogue between two rabbis:
“By the scream I have known my screams, by tears I have known my tears. This is my portion of the given suffering,” wrote Reb Shemin. And Reb Elovar: “I have never screamed, I have not shed any tears. This is my portion of the given suffering” (182).
We each experience our own portion of pain, which is part of the universal Pain.
The pain we each must bear is part of the greater pain shared by all that lives. It is not just “our” pain but the pain, and realizing this awakens our universal compassion (Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart 75).
If we can recognize that everyone feels pain to some degree, then perhaps we can be more gentle, more compassionate, more loving, more kind to one another.
Paul writes, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep" (Romans 12:15). He doesn't say, “Rejoice with those whose reason for rejoicing aligns with yours.” He doesn't say, “Weep with those whose pain you also have experienced.” He says, “When someone experiences joy or sorrow, experience that feeling with them—not as they feel it, but as you understand it.” I know what joy is, so I can rejoice with others, even if I don't understand their joy in its particulars. Same thing with pain. (And same thing with anger, sadness, etc.)
Ross Gay on Defining Joy
In 2016, poet Ross Gay gave himself a challenge: “write a delight every day for a year.” In 2019, he published his collection of over a hundred “essayettes” (short essays) as The Book of Delights. In entry 14, he talks about joy as a joining of sorrows.
Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: “What if we joined our wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.
And what if the wilderness—perhaps the densest wild in there—thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?)—is our sorrow? Or, to use [Zadie] Smith’s term, the “intolerable.” It astonishes me sometimes—no, often—how every person I get to know—everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything—lives with some profound personal sorrow. … Is this, sorrow, … the great wilderness?
Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that? … What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy? (49–50).
Months later, in entry 60, he writes as if he has had no gap in his train of thought, as if he needs to deepen the revelation about the link between sorrow and joy:
Or, like this: In healthy forests, which we might imagine to exist mostly above ground, and be wrong in our imagining, given as the bulk of the tree, the roots, are reaching through the earth below, there exists a constant communication between those roots and mycelium, where often the ill or weak or stressed are supported by the strong and surplussed.
By which I mean a tree over there needs nitrogen, and a nearby tree has extra, so the hyphae (so close to hyphen, the handshake of the punctuation world), the fungal ambulances, ferry it over. Constantly. This tree to that. That to this. And that in a tablespoon of rich fungal duff (a delight: the phrase fungal duff, meaning a healthy forest soil, swirling with the living the dead make) are miles and miles of hyphae, handshakes, who get a little sugar for their work. …
Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things … joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy (162–163).
Instead of hiding our sorrows, instead of suppressing them in ourselves and in others in order to find “joy” (ignorance is bliss, right?), Gay advocates that we acknowledge the sharedness of our sorrow. In entry 14, he suggest that we might join our separate sorrows together. I bring my pain, you bring yours. In entry 60, he argues that our shared humanity is our common mortality. Once we recognize that, we might recognize that our sorrow is like a mycelial network, connecting us to one another.
Gay’s joy-sorrow revelation crescendoes in his next collection of essays, Inciting Joy (2022). In the opening essay, he responds to readers who ask how he can write about joy when there is so much sorrow and suffering in the world. He argues we need a different definition of joy.
It strikes me as a particularly dangerous fantasy … that because we often think of joy as meaning “without pain” or “without sorrow”—which, to reiterate, our consumer culture has us believing is a state of being that we could buy—not only is it sometimes considered “unserious” or frivolous to talk about joy (i.e. But there’s so much pain the world!), but this definition also suggests that someone might be able to live without—or maybe a more accurate phrase is free of—heartbreak or sorrow. …
But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? (2–4).
Gay goes on to say that we should “invite sorrow in” (4). Thus begins an extended metaphor—or is it a parable—about what happens when we do so. “We ask sorrow about themselves. … We eventually decide to invite a small group of friends over for a potluck, because we want sorrow to meet them.” But then sorrow asks, “Maybe more than just your closest friends?” (5).
In a whirlwind of invitations—reminiscent of Jesus’s parable about inviting people from the “highways and byways” to a great feast (Matthew 22:1–14; Luke 14:16–24)—you end up inviting “a couple acquaintances from work,” “the mechanic,” “the neighbors we wave at,” someone you hate, and finally, “anyone with some sorrow to bring along.” The invitation is simple: “Bring a dish and bring your sorrows.”
People introduce their sorrows to each other, and pretty soon, the party is hopping. People share their sorrows and plan future activities together. There’s dancing, singing, basketball, games, food. When a fight breaks out, an old woman breaks it up and asks “Where the hell are your sorrows?” The kids and their sorrows reconnect and work things out.
Gay amazes with his acrobatic sentences and delights with his vivid imagery. By the end of this parable-metaphor, the reader can’t help but smile at the energy and joy of this imagined scene. We are so swept up in the “potluck of sorrow,” it’s hard to remember where we left off in the “logical” argument. Gay brings us back: “Now that we’ve defined joy … ,” he says. What? He just spent the whole chapter talking about sorrow! How can sorrow and joy coexist? By now, you probably know the answer. Here is what Gay says:
My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. … My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love (9).
Notice that he does not say joy automatically “emerges” from sorrow. Sorrow is not a vending machine for joy. Joy grows when we mutually share and care for each other’s sorrows.
Rachel Weeping For Her Children
December is a dark and challenging month for many people. December is the month of sorrow for my wife and me. I encourage you to read my post from last December about our return to church (and to Christmas) after losing a child to get a fuller picture of what I say next.
Last year was our first time in church in December since 2017. We attended the Christmas Eve service for the first time since our son died. The reason we felt we could do so was because the church—in its regular worship services—held space for sorrow and pain. Even during the children’s message, the pastor did not shy away from speaking about grief and how it might affect someone’s sense of peace or joy. That is when I knew this church had space for our story of loss.
Death, grief, and pain are part of the Christmas-Epiphany story. Yes, we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the light of the world, the Messiah, the deliverer of Israel and all the world. But there is also sorrow. King Herod, threatened by the “anointed one” (the baby who was his political rival), orders his soldiers to slaughter every child “in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under” (Matthew 2:16). This is known traditionally as the Massacre of the Innocents.
Matthew quotes from the prophet Jeremiah in response to this tragedy:
A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled,
because they are no more.
Matthew 2:18
There is much suffering in the world. We should not hide it nor hide from it. Instead, we acknowledge the sorrow and pain that we and others experience. If we can, as Ross Gay encourages, introduce our sorrows to each other, perhaps that would lead to more solidarity, and to more joy.
Joy as a Holder
Cole Arthur Riley suggests that joy is larger than just a feeling—joy is a foundation, a space, a shelter for our other emotions. Joy is a stabilizer.
In her book This Here Flesh, Riley writes that
joy situates every emotion within itself. It grounds them so that one isn’t overindulged while the others lie starving. Joy doesn’t replace any emotion; it holds them all and keeps any one of them from swallowing us whole. Society has failed to understand this. When it tells us to find joy in suffering, it is telling us to let it go, to move on, to smile through it. But joy says, Hold on to your sorrow. It can rest safely here (164–165).
Our joy can be jubilant. Our joy can also be subdued. Our joy can keep us steady as we pass through different emotions (or as those emotions pass through us). Joy, Riley argues, is “much more about peace than vibrancy” (167).
Our joy does not need to shy away from the sorrowful or tragic or harmful or traumatic. It can acknowledge those realities honestly and embrace our pain and healing both.
When repair happens, we must bear witness to it. Joy does that. It trains us toward a spirituality that isn’t rife with toxic positivity but is capable of telling the truth and celebrating when restoration has indeed happened. … As we experience restoration and healing, joy is at once our memory of the bondage that once was and an honoring of the liberation that has come (165).
Riley also writes about the communal aspect of joy. When she was a child, she would hide “in closets or bathrooms while everyone else laughed together in the kitchen” (168). Her family would check on her, ask her to join them, but she stayed by herself, not wanting her sadness to ruin the mood. She didn’t feel she belonged to her “loud, laughing family.”
It took time for me to realize that it was not that my family wanted me happy; it was that they wanted me close. They didn’t want for me the kind of sadness that alienates you. In time, I learned how to be in the kitchen, and it didn’t seem to matter if I was laughing. My sister pulls me close and feeds me a bite of spinach dip. Just stay with me.
Depression may contain a joylessnesss, but it doesn’t have to. When we reimagine joy as more than mere happiness, we make space for a sorrowful joy. Mine is a joy born not of laughter but of peace (168).
Can we make space for a sorrowful joy? In our hearts? In our relationships? In our communities and churches?
Sharing the Gifts of Sorrow
Sorrow can create an emptiness within. But what if that emptiness is a space, a guest room, to host the sorrow of others?
Sometimes I don’t want to share that I’ve lost a child because I don’t want to burden the listener. I don’t want to put them in an awkward situation where they feel they have to “perfectly” acknowledge my loss and grief.
But eventually, when talking about my children, I am compelled to bring up Emerson, who would be eight-and-a-half now, in third grade. I never regret sharing about Emerson’s life and death. On occasion, my sharing leads the other person to share their own grief. My sharing has opened space for them to share their sorrow.
A year after Emerson died, my wife and I joined a group of other bereaved parents (organized through a bereavement program at Seattle Children’s Hospital). The first few meetings were awkward as everyone shared their story and we got to know each other better. But in that group, I could also relax. I didn’t have to hide my sorrow, didn’t have to explain to others what grief feels like, didn’t have to reassure people they could talk about Emerson without offending me. I could bring my whole self to that group. We could hold each other’s grief. By sharing our sorrows, we were both guest and host for one another.
Just as water reflects the face,
so one human heart reflects another.
Proverbs 27:19
In our culture, Christmas is called the “season of giving.” This is often limited to giving gifts to our families and friends, perhaps something to charity.
What if we shared sorrows? What if we exchanged the gifts of sorrow with each other? This might create a space in which we could be more authentic to ourselves and to one another. By sharing our sorrows, by mutual care and listening, we can enter more fully into the joy of solidarity, the joy of knowing and being known.
A Prayer
God of gold, we seek your glory:
the richness that transforms our drabness into color,
and brightens our dullness with vibrant light;
your wonder and joy at the heart of all life.God of incense, we offer you our prayer:
our spoken and unspeakable longings, our questioning of truth,
our searching for your mystery deep within.God of myrrh, we cry out to you in our suffering:
the pain of all our rejections and bereavements,
our baffled despair at undeserved suffering,
our rage at continuing injustice;
and we embrace you, God-with-us,
in our wealth, in our yearning, in our anger and loss.- an Epiphany prayer by Jan Berry, compiled in Bread of Tomorrow: Prayers for the Church Year