Born Into Mysterious Misery
The joy-birthing sacredness of sadness
This essay is based on a sermon series about the “Inside Out” and “Inside Out 2” emotions at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, CA.
After many, many months of waiting, I finally got to meet one of my best friend’s new baby girl a few weeks ago.
And she is absolutely adorable.
It goes without saying that her parents are over-the-moon thrilled because—the truth is—the journey for this little one to get here has been a challenge.
Her parents told me about their hold-your-breath moment on the day she was born as they waited to hear her cry for the first time. When she did, more than nine months of bottled up anticipation finally left with an exhale.
Nothing like a crying baby to help you breathe easy.
As my friend was telling me that story, she laughed and said it was like her baby was screaming, “Hey! Thanks for ripping me out of my really comfortable little room. I really liked it in there!”
And that made me think.
I don’t know which emotion we experience first (I’m not sure anyone ever will), but I think the first thing we feel must be the tension between the joy and sadness.
(Oh, and maybe some “WHAT IS HAPPENING?!?!?” fear in there, too.)
Our lives begin with this jolt from what I imagine is blissful peace — all is well and we’re pretty much taken care of. Suddenly, that is severed, and in an instant, we are in a new world on our own.
Our first reaction?
Crying. Sorrow. Sadness.
Because we feel disconnected.
Sadness is an emotion that lets us know that we’ve been disconnected from our joy and our peace. It tells us that we’re missing something. Or even that we’ve lost something.
A relationship.
A freedom.
A comfort.
A trust.
A purpose.
A dream.
Sadness is the sting of that severing.
Some theologians have even gone so far as to say that sadness is actually the big problem of the world, and “sin” is better understood as “misery.”
What they mean is that life is mysteriously miserable because just simply being here can be really hard. When we say we live in a “sinful world,” we really mean that we feel and respond and react to the weight of a misery that is everywhere.
The story of the Garden of Eden echoes this. Human beings go from the comfort of a lush, life-giving garden into the hot desert where we are hit with pain and loss and the hard work of growing gardens on our own.
That’s difficult.
And it can be really sad.
And yet, that is the truth of the human condition. We do experience sadness. And that’s exactly why we need to honor it.
Pete Docter is the director and writer of the original Inside Out. He reflected about sadness in an interview when the first film came out, and said:
“We all want happiness in our life. We literally tell our kids don’t be sad. With sadness specifically, in America you read about people medicating to avoid sadness. They don’t want to experience sadness and yet it’s such a vital part of being human. There is a real value to all the other emotions that is part of the richness of life, and it’s not until you really recognize that I think you really have the ability to connect with the world in a deeper way.”
Honoring our sadness is a gateway toward a deeper relationship with ourselves and one another.
The Christian story—I gotta tell you—it is sad.
It isn’t just sad. It is horrific.
The beautiful expression of God’s love and grace somehow captured inside of a person is pushed away and ultimately destroyed. People experience compassion and joy like they never have before, and suddenly it is taken away from them.
But that’s exactly why this story is so real and true.
It proclaims the honesty of the human experience. It touches every inch of suffering, of alienation, of war, of violence, of rejection, of shame, of loneliness.
Every pain that a human being can feel is felt and acknowledged and affirmed in the Christian story.
It is honest about the misery of this world. And because of that, it is a sad, sad story.
Even Jesus himself acknowledges this sadness. In one of his last sermons to his disciples in the Gospel of John, Jesus beings to unravel the mystery of his coming death and says to them, “You will cry. You will lament. You will be sorrowful.”
Jesus prepares them for the raw honesty of grief. He’s not afraid of the sadness.
But then he reminds them, “You have sorrow now; but no one takes away your joy.”
Underneath our sad, sad Christian story is a foundation of unbreakable hope and promise. Because—our story says — our sadness will never be the end of the story.
Instead, Jesus says, our sorrow is part of a birthing process.
Joy is like a newborn baby born through the pain of our sorrow. Joy arises when our sadness gets to reveal an honest expression of the real pain of this world.
Our sadness becomes a vehicle for care and compassion, and just like a baby’s cry, it can draw us closer together — if we let it — to repair, to mend, to heal so we can reconnect with a new joy.
Some time ago, a friend came to me stuck, torn-up, lost—and just simply sad.
“Life has been rough. I need a glimmer of light,” he said.
We talked about what had been going on.
Relationships ended.
Finances gone.
Jobs changing.
Leaving home.
Moving cities.
It was one thing after another. Life was dark.
“I feel like the ground opened up in front of me, and I’m about to fall in,” he mentioned.
Just one of those things is enough to shake up a life. And he felt the crushing weight of it all.
So we just talked.
And talked.
We cried, too.
And eventually he said, “This is my glimmer.”
Something happens when we have the courage to give ourselves over to the reality of our sadness. To not need to have it all put together. To let go of compulsory joy and be free to feel.
Something new is born when sadness and our unshakeable deep joy come together.
We find that moment at the end of Inside Out. The main character, a little girl named Riley, moves to San Francisco from Minnesota. She tries and tries to be happy and discovers she really feels disconnected and lost.
One day, she decides to run away on a one-way Greyhound ticket back home. But just as she’s about to get on the freeway, sadness stirs inside of her and pulls her back to her family who holds her in her tears.
This is who our God is.
Through Jesus, we know that the God who brings us into this world and the God to whom we return, never leaves our side, holds us close, and cries every tear with us.
When we don’t have anyone to listen to us or in those times when we’ve worn some folks out — and that happens sometimes — we can always take our tears and sadness to God who will hear and understand all of it.
Our God is a God that listens to the cries of the world and also came into this world with the cry of a baby and knows this world.
God proclaims our sadness is sacred. It leads us to the honest-to-God truth about ourselves, about our relationships, about the world.
May you have the courage to honor your sadness.
If you’re in a sorrowful space, may you have the courage to cry, to mourn, to lament, to grieve.
And if you’re not there—or when your tears have dried—may you have the courage to hear the cries of others and draw close to them just as God draws close to you.
Because there is a glimmer of light in that moment.
In those tender, together times, you conquer the misery of this world. That’s where you find newborn joy, birthed from the boundless joy of our gracious God.
