Tears of Joy and Sadness
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.
—Galatians 5:22–23
In the Christian Scriptures, we are reminded that joy is a fruit of the Spirit in all circumstances. Father Richard Rohr describes a personal experience of simultaneous deep sadness and profound joy.
In 1985 my Franciscan superiors gave me a year’s leave to spend in contemplation. It was a major turning point in my life and ultimately led to the formation of the Center for Action and Contemplation. The first thirty days of my “sabbatical” were spent in the hills of Kentucky, in Thomas Merton’s hermitage at Gethsemani Abbey. I was absolutely alone with myself, with the springtime woods, and with God, hoping to somehow absorb some of Merton’s wisdom. That first morning, it took me a while to slow down. I must have looked at my watch at least ten times before 7:00 AM! I had spent so many years standing in front of crowds as a priest and a teacher. I had to find out who I was alone before God without those trappings.
Walter Burghardt’s definition of contemplation as “a long loving look at the real” became transformative for me. The world, my own issues and hurts, all my goals and desires gradually dissolved and fell into proper perspective. God became obvious and ever present. I understood what Merton meant when he said, “The gate of heaven is everywhere.” [1]
I tried to keep a journal of what was happening to me. Back then, I found it particularly hard to cry. But one evening I laid my finger on my cheek and found to my surprise that it was wet. I wondered what those tears meant. What was I crying for? I wasn’t consciously sad or consciously happy. I noticed at that moment that behind it all there was a joy, deeper than any private joy. It was a joy in the face of the beauty of being, a joy at all the wonderful and lovable people I had already met in my life. Cosmic or spiritual joy is something we participate in; it comes from elsewhere and flows through us. It has little or nothing to do with things going well in our own life at that moment. I remember thinking that this must be why the saints could rejoice in the midst of suffering.
At the same moment, I experienced exactly the opposite emotion. The tears were at the same time tears of an immense sadness—a sadness at what we’re doing to the earth, sadness about the people whom I had hurt in my life, and sadness too at my own mixed motives and selfishness. I hadn’t known that two such contrary feelings could coexist. I was truly experiencing the nondual mind of contemplation.
Awe, Surrender, Joy
Father Richard describes the stunned silence that accompanies moments of awe and surrender:
The spiritual journey is a constant interplay between moments of awefollowed by a general process of surrender to that moment. We must first allow ourselves to be captured by the goodness, truth, or beauty of something beyond and outside ourselves. Then we universalize from that moment to the goodness, truth, and beauty of the rest of reality, until our realization eventually ricochets back to include ourselves! Yet we humans resist both the awe and, even more, the surrender. The ego resists the awe while the will resists the surrender. But both together are vital and necessary. [1]
As she often did, Dr. Barbara Holmes (1943–2024) expands and strengthens my thinking by her description of “joy unspeakable.” Awe is not always inspired by beauty and goodness. Truth sometimes comes in hard packages. It takes both great love and great suffering to stun us and bring us to our knees. God is there in all of it, using every circumstance of our life, to draw us ever more deeply into the heart of God. [2]
Dr. Barbara Holmes writes:
Ultimately, joy unspeakable is a mystery, and because each mystery begets another, it is a daunting task to describe the indescribable. Song, dance, and ritual help. This is how Grant Wacker describes the joy that emerges out of spiritual revival: “And then there was joy—not necessarily happiness, a passing emotion—but joy, the quiet, deep-seated conviction that one’s life made sense.” [3]
From the beginning, Africana people in the diaspora have defined the sensibility of their lives within the context of struggle and resistance. We have begun to realize that while overt systematic oppression may be removed, we all bear the scars and traces of racism’s collective demonic possession. And yet we must all go on, and we must all go on together as a community.
Accordingly, our obsession with blame and with the question of who is or is not worthy of God’s full embrace disrupts the journey. For we are not headed toward a single goal: we are on a pilgrimage toward the center of our hearts. It is in this place of prayerful repose that joy unspeakable erupts.
Joy Unspeakable
erupts when you least expect it,
when the burden is greatest,
when the hope is gone
after bullets fly.
It rises
on the crest of impossibility,
it sways to the rhythm
of steadfast hearts,
and celebrates
what we cannot see.
This joy beckons us not as individual monastics but as a community. It is a joy that lives as comfortably in the shout as it does in silence. It is expressed in the diversity of personal spiritual disciplines and liturgical rituals. This joy is our strength, and we need strength because we are well into the twenty-first century, and we are not healed. How shall we negotiate postmodernity without inner strength? [4]
| JUN 16, 2025. from Skye Jethani Compassion > Explanation |
 It’s uncommon for a gospel writer to devote an entire chapter to a single miracle, but that is what we find in John chapter 9. It’s another account of Jesus healing a blind man. It’s worth noting that miracles of abundance and even raising the dead are also attributed to Old Testament prophets—but none of them restored sight to the blind, but it’s the most common miracle performed by Jesus in the gospels. It was seen as a significant sign of Jesus’ power and evidence that God’s kingdom had arrived, but in this chapter, the healing is used to communicate a more specific message about the character of those who enter the kingdom and those who do not.Jesus and his disciples encountered a man who was born blind. “Rabbi,” they asked him, “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). The disciples were asking an age-old question. It’s a question we see throughout Scripture and especially in the Psalms. It’s a question we still ask all the time. Why? Why do bad things happen? Every person—both believers and non-believers—senses that things are not as they ought to be, and we want to know why. We experience a world marked by misery, injustice, scarcity, and ugliness, and we turn to our teachers, our “rabbis,” for an explanation. Notice, however, that the disciples’ question assumed the answer. They had already concluded that sin caused the man’s blindness; their only question was whose sin—the man’s or his parents? In this case, the disciples revealed their true teacher was not Jesus, but their culture, which had taught them to believe all suffering was a form of divine judgment upon sin. Therefore, if you were poor, sick, disabled, or victimized, the explanation was simple—you deserved it. In the case of a person born disabled, like the blind man, the belief was that it was likely God’s judgment upon the parents’ sin. However, based on Old Testament passages that speak of God’s knowledge of and communion with children still in the womb (see Psalm 139:16, Jeremiah 1:5), some rabbinical teaching at the time argued children could actually sin before birth. To be fair, the disciples’ assumed explanation is the one held by many people even today. For example, following the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed more than 200,000 people in 14 countries, The Los Angeles Times published an article titled, “Deadly Tsunami Resurrects the Old Question of Why.” The piece asked religious leaders from the impacted countries to explain the tragedy. A Buddhist from Sri Lanka said, “Buddhist doctrine makes people responsible for their own fate.” He said those who died were punished for their own decisions in this life or a past one, while those who survived were rewarded. A Hindu leader offered the same explanation. “People have not lived up to what they are supposed to do.”Both Hinduism and Buddhism are karmic religions that assume, like Jesus’ disciples, that each person’s pleasure or pain is the result of their sin or sanctity. It’s a view found in much of pop Christianity as well. On one level, karma offers a simple and rational explanation for suffering. Intuitively, it makes sense and removes the mystery of evil in the world. On another level, however, karma undermines the call to compassion because, according to its spiritual logic, people suffer because they deserve to suffer, and alleviating their pain would be interfering in God’s judgment and risking it for yourself. In the same LA Times article, the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders interviewed refused to offer an explanation, instead saying the tsunami’s cause was beyond their knowledge. It was a mystery. “We have no right to say these people were destroyed because of their sins,” the Imam said. While the Christian leader turned the focus away from trying to explain the tragedy to a focus on Jesus’ compassion for those who were suffering. In this way, he was echoing Jesus’ response to his disciples in John 9.First, Jesus rejected the answer assumed by his disciples’ question. He simply said, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned” (John 9:3). Of course, Jesus wasn’t saying the man and his parents had never sinned—they were as human and sinful as the rest of us. Rather, Jesus was denying that their sin was the cause of the blindness. But then Jesus offered no further explanation. No theological argument for the origin of evil or pain. No rabbinical wisdom about the meaning of suffering. No spiritual law of cause and effect previously undisclosed by the prophets. Instead, he left it a mystery and shifted the focus from explanation to compassion.Rather than a sinner displaying God’s judgment, to Jesus, the man was God’s child made to display his glory. While the disciples wanted to understand the man’s condition, Jesus wanted to heal his condition—and he did. These opening verses set up the theme of the whole chapter which we will explore more deeply in the days ahead. As we will see, John 9 contrasts the blindness of those who value their own knowledge, answers, and explanations, with the humble compassion of those who see and enter God’s kingdom. DAILY SCRIPTURE. JOHN 9:1-41 WEEKLY PRAYER. from St. Gertrude the Great (1256 – 1302) Lord, in union with your love, unite my work with your great work, and perfect it. As a drop of water, poured into a river, is taken up into the activity of the river, so may my labor become part of your work. So, may those among whom I live and work be drawn into your love. Amen. |
