The Deep Mystery of Sacred Sadness

Often the mystics will speak of a great sorrow in contemplation. It is very common, especially in our modern times to have an intense aversion to any talk of spiritual sadness as a virtue. We have a prevailing feeling, especially in the west, that spirituality must always be uplifting and positive. This tendency arises out of a confusion about what love truly is. We know that God is love, and that we are called to live lives of love, but we often think of the fake love of Hollywood movies and catchy pop songs. Love is not a positive happy feeling. It is not always uplifting and encouraging. Love is selflessness, it is the rapture of being lost in the well being of others. So, it follows naturally that if we have love for creation, as God does, that we will feel a great sadness for the condition of the world and those within it.

There is a great heaviness in truth. In the reality of life there is hurt and pain for all of God’s creatures, and in many of God’s children this pain and injury is all consuming and relentless. For this reason God weeps for humanity. Through Jesus, God has chosen to be enmeshed with our suffering and our death, both spiritual and physical. And so, as we become gradually aware of the truth we become more and more aware of the great sadness of reality. In the words of King Solomon, the great mystical teacher:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
With much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief

Deep within the spiritual world is a center of absolute nothingness. This is a profound realisation for the spiritual practitioner to make. Underneath all our ideas of what is right or good the truth is much more bleak. The knowledge of this is a necessary step if one wishes to dwell with God. For in order to understand fully what is God and what is not, we need to see that without God we are meaningless. There is nothing innovative or excellent we can do, and the more we learn and try the more this grief grows in relation to our efforts. The more we acquire, the more we realise our own poverty. The more we come to know God the more we see the meaninglessness of all creation.

So, if you find yourself feeling a heaviness in your heart, don’t assume that means you are off track. If you find yourself mourning for the state of the world, then you are mourning with Christ. Do not fight the sadness, do not run from it. Be at peace with it. Be comfortable in it. And know that it is fleeting just like our meaningless lives. Learn to rest in the beauty of the Divine Sorrow. For not only are we empty in our being but God is just as much grief as love. If we are not tangibly soaked in the tears of Christ then we are not living in the truth. This is the sacred sorrow.

When it comes to sadness, as with all things, the presence of the sacred can be known by the presence of peace. Divine sadness is a peaceful sadness, a heavy sadness. If the sadness you are experiencing is accompanied by anxiety or anger then it is not the sadness of the Lord. There is something so pure about the sadness of Christ because it does not worry. After all, anxiety too is meaningless. Therefore the sorrow of God is peaceful and even beautiful. It is the reason the autumn colours which herald the season of death and bitter cold, captivate our hearts and eyes so well. It is a magnificent sadness worth relishing in!

Yet, underneath this delectable sorrow is a river of love which is neither sadness nor joy. It is eternity, beyond any human description. We call it love because that’s the closest human word we have – but it is more than love, more than the joy and sorrow which go along with love. It is the root of all joy and sorrow. Once we find peace with our sorrow and with our joy then we can move into the realm of the Eternal – and our spiritual journey will have found the sacred well from which our soul longs to drink.