Holding Space for Joy and Sorrow
Editor’s Note: This article was originally posted at IndiAanya, a space where Christian women in India can discuss faith and life in community.
At the end of last year, I attended a wedding and a funeral on the same day. It was an experience of excruciating sorrow to witness the sudden passing of someone who was immensely loved and whose life, affection, and witness shaped my life in many ways. It was also a thrilling joy to celebrate the wedding of a couple I am deeply fond of, whose love for one another and deep friendship shone on their faces.
I prepared myself to be completely present in both spaces—to rejoice with those who rejoice and to mourn with those who mourn. Outwardly, I changed my clothes to fit the occasion. Inwardly, for the most part, I was able to immerse myself in the moment and shift between rejoicing and mourning.
In the process, two realities struck me regarding my experience and possibly what is true of the human experience. It is hard to compartmentalise joy and sorrow. At the funeral, I had moments where I rejoiced at the impact of her life and at the hope we have in Christ of new life and resurrection. Similarly, there were bittersweet moments at the wedding. While a new family was being born with the couple saying, “I do,” their immediate families grappled with the new reality they had to live with. The couple was the first to get married in each family, and they were moving to a new city immediately after the wedding. For all of them, life would never be the same again.
The Interwovenness of Joy and Sorrow
Joy and sorrow are interwoven in daily life. Living in the goodness of God’s creation and being created in His image means that we encounter beauty, laughter, love, and gifts of grace in our everyday lives. The brokenness of the world means that we also encounter pain, suffering, loss, and death at regular intervals and sometimes for long seasons. I can tend to downplay and suppress either joy or sorrow so that I feel what I think is the right or Christian way to be. Sometimes I feel guilty for enjoying something when I, or someone I love, is going through a tough time. Sometimes, I feel I need to get over sadness because I am letting God and others down—it’s fine for sorrow to be short and sweet, but there needs to be a time limit, after which I need to buckle up and appear sorted.
The Psalms teach us to lament, and they teach us to rejoice—both are equally valid postures to come before God, and often both are present to varying degrees in our lives. To deny and suppress them before God and others is to pretend and perform. There are aspects of God’s character that have become tangible to me only in times of great sorrow. Suppressing my sorrow before God and before others robs me of experiencing the beauty of God’s comfort and compassion. I’m learning to let myself be real about sorrow and be real about joy. To not set limits or boundaries on the experience of either but in both, be open to what God is teaching me, to know that He is present with me, and to rest in His unchanging character. I want sorrow to lead me to experience true joy, and I want the experience of joy to root me in the ultimate joy of being God’s beloved.
The Risk of Joy
What I also realised about myself is that I am more cautious when it comes to joy. I expect to experience sorrow in a world ravaged by the brokenness of sin, both mine and others. But joy feels so risky and elusive. Lurking under the surface of anything I feel joy about is the nagging suspicion of, “How long can this last? There is bound to be some kind of pain or suffering that is going to come my way because, after all, isn’t that how God is going to grow my character?” And I begin to wonder when this high will come crashing down.
My perspective is skewed because I live with sorrow as the underlying reality of this world. Sorrow feels like the permanent thing, with God doling out glimpses of joy now and then. But the truth is that joy is the eternal reality of God’s world. Joy was present before sorrow could show its face. As C. S. Lewis says, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.” Sorrow is temporary, and one day God will wipe away all our tears, and there will be no more sorrow and no more pain.
I tend to trust God more easily in the midst of sorrow than in the midst of joy. My anxious heart needs to learn again and again to trust God’s goodness—not that God is good in the general sense, but God is good to me. Tish Harrison Warren, in her book Prayer in the Night writes,
“We have to learn to trust God in order to receive even good things from Him. And learning to receive good things from God is difficult, especially if you’ve been hurt. It’s hard to learn to trust goodness and beauty. It takes practice to face the reality of darkness, but also to ask for—and hope for—light. Hope admits the truth of our vulnerability. It does not trust God to keep all bad things from happening. But it assumes that redemption, beauty, and goodness will be there for us, whatever lies ahead.”
Joy is a defiant hope, and one day, it will be an ever-present reality. But for now, as I live with an intermingling of joy and sorrow, with a daily mix of highs and lows, seasons of what feels like endless sorrow and seasons of joy that feel elusive, I pray that sorrow will teach me what to root my joy in and my joy will be full and complete because it comes from Jesus.
About the Author
Shobana Vetrivel enjoys the hustle and bustle of city life and the adventure of living in New Delhi. She has an educational background in social development and theology and has worked in both development and ministry settings. She currently works with Delhi School of Theology and is pursuing a PhD in Practical Theology. Books, travelling, theology, coffee and deep conversations are a few of her favourite things.