On the Tending of Sadness

I encounter a wide range emotions each week out at the jail. Anger, resignation, apathy, confusion, relief, resentment, fear, optimism, loneliness, bitterness. And sadness. So much sadness. I sat with a guy recently who had reached his late thirties, was looking back at a ruined few decades, at a marriage destroyed, the dull fog of addictions, violence, kids who won’t speak to him, etc. The list of regrets was long and varied and soaked with pain. He’s turning a corner, and he’s reaching toward faith. But as we sat there yesterday, mostly there was just a lot of sadness. 

Sadness at the jail comes in all shapes and sizes. There is sadness for things that have been done, and things that have been left undone. Sadness for what has been endured and what has been inflicted. Sadness for relationships that are failing or flailing or have been burned to the ground and seem impossible to restore. Sadness at roads not taken and doors that seem never to open. Sadness at never being able to become the selves that they aspire to be. Sadness for a world that seems to conspire against their best intentions. Some guys bleed their sadness all over the floor. Some guys keep it locked up tight. But all of them carry it, in some form or another. 

We all do. Sadness is obviously not confined to those in prison cells. I’ve been a pastor (and a human being) long enough to know that there is plenty of sadness out there and it tends to be fairly broadly, if unevenly distributed. It shows up in desperate places, certainly, in lives that are falling apart for all the usual reasons. It also lurks in the shadows of lives that look shiny and successful and trending in the right direction. I can’t count the number of times over the years that I have scratched a bit beneath the surface of someone’s story—someone who looked fairly “put together”—and been stunned at what they had gone through or were currently going through. There’s an awful lot of pain out there that doesn’t necessarily see the light of day. 

Like many, I read Allen Levi’s popular novel Theo of Golden earlier this year. I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t read it, but it’s a touching story in many ways. Theo is 86 years old when he shows up in a town called Golden and his life begins to intersect with the townspeople in all kinds of interesting ways. We come to learn that Theo, too, has sadness in his story. At one point, someone says to Theo, “You don’t strike me as a sad man, Theo. If you are, you’re good at disguising it.”

Theo’s response is an interesting and instructive one:

There is no virtue in advertising one’s sadness. But there is no wisdom in denying it either. And there is the beautiful possibility that great love can grow out of sadness if it’s well-tended. Sadness can make us bitter or wise. We get to choose. 

Like the guys in the jail, we often veer toward two extremes when it comes to our sadness. We bleed all over the floor, insisting that our sadness dominate every group setting we’re a part of, or we keep it buried and refuse to let it breathe. To borrow Theo’s language, we advertise it or we deny it. Too rarely, do we tend it well or even imagine that there could be such a thing.

Because tending one’s sadness well is hard. Often, it can include some of the most private and painful parts of our lives. It can mean exposing things we’d prefer to keep hidden or remaining judiciously silent about things we’d love to scream from the rooftops. Wisdom is knowing when, where, to whom, how much, and for what reason. To feel alone in one’s sadness is a terrible thing. To acknowledge (and to demand that others acknowledge) nothing but one’s sadness is also a terrible thing. The “great love” Theo speaks of grows out of neither approach.

My morning prayers today had me in Isaiah 30 which is a quite blistering indictment of Israel’s sin and rebellion. The prophet talks about the people being made to eat “the bread of adversity” and drink “the water of affliction.” Which is perhaps a poetic way of describing the deep existential sadness that can descend when we have made a mess of things or when things seem broken beyond repair. But, as always in the prophets, there is a light that shines through the thicket of sin and judgment and waste. 

In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength (Isa. 30:15).

With respect to the tending of sadness, I was struck by that last line in particular. And particularly in our context. We don’t do quiet very well in our time. We are algorithmically incentivized to broadcast our pain far and wide and to demand it be acknowledged. We are the heroes of our story and our sadness is surely singular in nature. Except it’s probably not. And obsessing over it surely isn’t ultimately the way toward that beautiful possibility that a great love can come out of it. Isaiah gives us better tools for the sadness. Repentance. Rest. Quietness. Trust. Trust that “weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Ps. 30:5).

I didn’t tell the guy at the jail that he needed to learn how to tend his sadness so that beautiful possibilities and great loves might emerge from it. We did talk about repentance and trust, though. And about how the failures of our past need not define the future. We talked about baptism and new beginnings. And in the end there was a warm handshake and a smile. The sadness is not gone, but it has perhaps begun to be reframed. In some small way, bitterness may be giving way to something like wisdom. And that’s not nothing.