July 10, 2022: Heart & Soul: Sadness
Heart & Soul: Sadness
Psalm 88
Rev. Rhonda Blevins
O Lord, God of my salvation,
at night, when I cry out before you,
let my prayer come before you;
incline your ear to my cry.
For my soul is full of troubles,
and my life draws near to Sheol.
I am counted among those who go down to the Pit;
I am like those who have no help,
like those forsaken among the dead,
like the slain that lie in the grave,
like those whom you remember no more,
for they are cut off from your hand.
You have put me in the depths of the Pit,
in the regions dark and deep.
Your wrath lies heavy upon me,
and you overwhelm me with all your waves. Selah
You have caused my companions to shun me;
you have made me a thing of horror to them.
I am shut in so that I cannot escape;
my eye grows dim through sorrow.
Every day I call on you, O Lord;
I spread out my hands to you.
Do you work wonders for the dead?
Do the shades rise up to praise you? Selah
Is your steadfast love declared in the grave
or your faithfulness in Abaddon?
Are your wonders known in the darkness
or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?
But I, O Lord, cry out to you;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
O Lord, why do you cast me off?
Why do you hide your face from me?
Wretched and close to death from my youth up,
I suffer your terrors; I am desperate.
Your wrath has swept over me;
your dread assaults destroy me.
They surround me like a flood all day long;
from all sides they close in on me.
You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me;
my companions are in darkness.
______
Today we continue our series, “Heart & Soul,” exploring our human emotions and what they can teach us about ourselves and how our emotional life intersects with our spiritual life. So far we’ve looked at four of eight primary emotions: fear, surprise, anger and joy. Today we tackle sadness. Yay.
I admit, this is a challenging topic to address on a Sunday morning. For example, how many of you would say that sadness is your favorite emotion to experience? No one? How many of you woke up this morning and thought, “I sure do hope I get to feel sad at church today!” No one? Exactly. But maybe, if we can shine a little light on sadness, understand what sadness is and what it can teach us, maybe we can learn to accept sadness for the gifts it can offer and grow emotionally and spiritually.
And an important caveat: I’m not talking about depression today, a mood disorder often related to a chemical imbalance. Depression is serious and can be treated. Today I’m talking about an emotion we all have, evidenced by the very first thing we did when we emerged from our mothers’ wombs. We cried!
So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you, sadness!
A couple of weeks ago we had a movie night and showed the Disney animated film Inside Out. When the film begins, we meet Riley, a happy-go-lucky eleven-year-old girl from Minnesota. She loves her family, and her friends, and she loves to play hockey on the frozen lake near her house. We meet five of Riley’s emotions, Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness. And as the movie begins, Joy is in charge. And then something happens that Riley can’t control. She and her parents have to move to San Francisco, away from her friends, away from her home, away from the frozen lake where she plays hockey. Joy wants to stay in charge in the emotional control center in Riley’s brain, but Sadness keeps touching memories in Riley’s mind. Once happy memories—yellow memories—are becoming blue because Sadness can’t help herself. Joy doesn’t like that one little bit. And in Joy’s efforts to suppress Sadness, they are both relegated to the far reaches of Riley’s mind, leaving Fear, Anger and Disgust at the control center.
Isn’t that exactly what happens when we stuff sadness in the trunk? When we suppress sadness, it often manifests as anger or fear or disgust, or some combination of all three.
Think of this example. Let’s consider a guy named John. John grew up in a neighborhood where everyone looked like him. His world was kind of a “Beaver Cleaver” world. White picket fences. Nuclear families with a mom and a dad and 2.5 kids and a church where the whole town gathered on Sunday mornings. The only conflict was when Eddie Haskell played some sophomoric prank to make the show even bearable to watch.
Fast forward 50 or 60 or 70 years and John is all grown up. His neighbors don’t look like him. Beaver Cleaver has left the building and there’s not a single white picket fence in the whole town. His wife divorced him years ago and he can’t understand how his 2.5 kids could think and act and vote the way they do. And church isn’t what it used to be either. There are all kinds of weird churches, like Baptist, for instance. Most of his neighbors don’t even go to church and the ones that do go to the “wrong” kind of church.
The world around John is no longer the world John knew and loved as a kid, and that makes John sad.
But the people around John don’t see sadness. What do they see? They experience John as crotchety. Grumpy. Always grumbling about the world and the latest thing he heard on the news. You see, Anger is at the control booth in John’s mind, with Fear and Disgust close by. John’s fear about what the world has become is obvious. His disgust, evident. His anger, palpable. But Sadness and Joy are M.I.A. Maybe Eddie Haskell took them.
Here’s the thing about sadness. When we suppress negative emotions like sadness, “we end up feeling worse . . . studies show that experiencing temporary sadness, and allowing ourselves to sit with those feelings when they come, can counterintuitively make us happier.”[1] Research also suggests that, “people who experience both high levels of positive emotion and high levels of negative emotion have the best overall feelings of well-being.”[2]
So let’s consider this idea through the lens of scripture. Joy and sadness are interwoven throughout the entirety of scripture. Happiness infuses sorrow. Hope in the midst of grief. Let’s look at our scripture text in light of this idea of positive and negative emotions coexisting.
Psalm 88 is one of many psalms of lament. But there’s something different about this psalm than most others. You see, the psalms of lament tend to follow a three-part pattern: they begin with a complaint, move to a petition, and then they declare some expression of faith or trust. Psalm 88 doesn’t follow this pattern. Psalm 88 also has three parts: it begins with a complaint, then continues the complaint, then ends with more complaint. Yesterday a friend asked me what my sermon was about today. I said, “Sadness—Psalm 88—read it and weep.”
It seems that the Psalmist regularly makes requests of God, but doesn’t sense that God is responding to his petitions. Listen again to verses 13-14:
But I, O Lord, cry out to you;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
O Lord, why do you cast me off?
Why do you hide your face from me?
Have you ever felt like your prayers were ignored by God? That they weren’t “making it past the ceiling?” I certainly have. There’s sadness, maybe even grief. There might be disappointment with God, because God isn’t meeting our expectation. But you see how backward that is, right? “God isn’t meeting our expectation?”
But here’s the good news when we voice this kind of sadness turned disappointment with God: complaining to God is a sign of an active faith. The person who gives up on faith, or who becomes apathetic about faith, offers no prayer at all. So to that I imagine God says, “Keep those disgruntled prayers coming!”
Here’s another thing to consider: so long as we’re communicating with God, we are demonstrating hope. Why else would we pray? When someone stops praying, it might indicate hopelessness or even despair.
So in the Book of Psalms, over a third of them (50 plus) are psalms of lament. The psalmists were in touch with their sadness, but it was not a sadness devoid of hope. You see, throughout the Psalms, and the entirety of scripture for that matter, happiness infuses sorrow. Hope penetrates grief. In fact, the most important story in our Christian faith is one of “death, burial, and resurrection.”
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?
1 Corinthians 15:55
Back to the movie, Inside Out. Because Joy tries to suppress Sadness, they both end up in the far reaches of Riley’s mind leaving Anger, Disgust and Fear at the control panel. Young Riley, who was once sweet and cheerful and flexible suddenly becomes sullen and angry, rude and disrespectful. But eventually Joy and Sadness find their way back to command central in Riley’s brain. And you know who saves the day? Sadness. How? As Riley falls into her parent’s loving arms weeping, talking about all the things she misses about Minnesota, her parents cry along with her. As it turns out, they all miss Minnesota. And because sadness clued in Riley’s parents that they needed to hold her, they all experienced love and bonding, Joy and Sadness at the very same time.
Sadness clues us into something going on inside of us. Here’s what sadness tells us: love is leaving. It’s all about love, you see.
· A less intense form of sadness is Pensiveness. It tells us love is languishing.
· Sadness tells us love is leaving.
· A more intense form of sadness is Grief. It tells us love is lost.
Sadness is all about love. People we love. Memories we cherish. Ideas we hold dear. We’re pensive, sad, or grief-stricken when we sense that love is languishing, leaving or lost.
I’d venture to guess you’ve been sad more often that you’d like to admit. I’ll take it a step further: I’ll guess you’ve been sad more often than you’re even aware.
But here’s the silver lining:
Sadness is our friend. Sadness can help us focus on what's important to us and to know what we truly want. What do we want? Remember: it’s all about love.
So in the midst of his hopeful sorrow, the psalmist wrote Psalm 88, perhaps the saddest poem or song of all the Psalms. And maybe, just maybe, it’s just what the doctor ordered.
Don’t believe me? Then believe Elton John! Here’s what he wrote about sad songs like Psalm 88:
Guess there are times when we all need to share a little pain
And ironing out the rough spots
Is the hardest part when memories remain
And it’s times like these when we all need to hear the radio
‘Cause from the lips of some old singer
We can share the troubles we already know
If someone else is suffering enough oh to write it down
When every single word makes sense
Then it’s easier to have those songs around
The kick inside is in the line that finally gets to you
And it feels so good to hurt so bad
And suffer just enough to sing the blues
So turn ‘em on, turn ‘em on
Turn on those sad songs
When all hope is gone
Why don’t you tune in and turn them on
I’ve been giving homework each Sunday during this series. This week it’s a little tricky. This week’s homework may not be for everyone. But if you’ve surpressed sadness, and you think maybe joy is harder to come by because Joy and Sadness tend to travel together, try one or both of these exercises this week.
Option 1: Write your own Psalm of lament. You don’t have to be a great writer. It doesn’t have to be poetry. Just write down the sadness that you feel in the form of a prayer. You don’t have to tie it with a pretty bow or end it with an exclamation of praise. The psalmist for Psalm 88 certainly didn’t do that. Just write what you feel. You’ll discover the catharsis is real.
Option 2: Turn ‘em on, turn on those sad songs. Set a timer; take 30-minutes and let the sadness of the music wash over you and soak into you. Allow yourself to feel the sadness that maybe you’ve been keeping suppressed for too long. Notice how the sadness is connected to love and a sense of loss. Let the sad songs remind you of what’s important and inform you about what you truly want. Then tell the sadness “Thank you” for helping you remember what you love.
Thanks be to God for the honesty of the psalmist, helping us to know that our sadness is perfectly OK, teaching us the gifts inherent in the sadness. That it’s all about love.
Sad songs, indeed, say so much.
[1] https://www.wellandgood.com/feeling-sadness-is-good/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIf%20we%20suppress%20our%20negative,can%20counterintuitively%20make%20us%20happier.%E2%80%9D
[2] https://www.ahchealthenews.com/2015/08/31/how-embracing-sadness-can-lead-to-happiness/