A Church Full of Sadness

Today's (11/1/14) sermon was on the centrality of sadness to the Christian life. We need sadness. Sadness is a correlate of love. To love, we have to be able to feel loss when things we love go away. It's a lifelong process to integrate sadness into our faith, to keep loving in the face of persistent loss.

The (now disgraced) comic Louis CK once offered a beautiful critique of our culture-wide inability to just stop and be sad. 

Here is a quote from Orthodox Priest Alexander Shmemman on the concept of "bright sadness:"

Little by little, we begin to understand, or rather to feel, that this sadness is indeed “bright,” that a mysterious transformation is about to take place in us. It is as if we were reaching a place to which the noises and the fuss of life, of the street, of all that which usually fills our days and even nights, have no access – a place where they have no power. All that which seemed so tremendously important to us as to fill our mind, that state of anxiety which has virtually become our second nature, disappear somewhere and we begin to feel free, light and happy. It is not the noisy and the superficial happiness which comes and goes twenty times a day and is so fragile and fugitive; it is a deep happiness which comes not from a single and particular reason but from our soul having, in the words of Dostoevsky, touched “another world.” And that which it has touched is made up of light and peace and joy, of an inexpressible trust.

It's OK to be sad. Give yourself permission. Let the waves come.