Dear one,
Sometime ago, maybe a year or two, in conversation with a friend I observed:
“I often tend to be morose—no, that’s wrong—I tend to be sober and melancholy. Most of the time I view the glass as ‘half-empty,’ or less than half-empty.”
My friend remained quiet and then said:
“Do you recall ‘the great sadness’?”
“‘The great sadness’? No ...”
“Paul Young wrote of ‘the great sadness’ in The Shack.”
“Ah, his fictionalized rendering of the Trinity? That I recall, but I don’t remember ‘the great sadness.’”
“‘The great sadness,’” my friend said with gentleness, “is a lens through which the world ... and life ... is seen as fundamentally, even deeply flawed. Something’s broken. Something’s wrong. In spite of moments of joy and wonder; in spite of scenes of dramatic alpine beauty or meadows of waving flowers; in spite of marvelous discoveries and advances, still an undercurrent of tragic loss and longing prevail. Something is wrong, perhaps horribly wrong.”
Last week I had an overwhelming sense of “the great sadness.” Having returned from a very positive experience in Uganda—forty hours of teaching and interacting with twenty-four pastors, who sincerely hunger for more—nonetheless I knew that my life, in comparison to theirs, is filled with great comfort and ease. I returned to bounty; they returned to dire scarcity. Oh, my first-world problems are real enough, but they are not third-world problems. Something’s amiss.
And then my pastoral eye observed a family with a low-grade conflict, which if not addressed, within a decade might render their relationships comatose. Hopefully this will not be their experience—and my knowledge of their family history is incomplete—but I nonetheless felt a rising gloom; for I realized that their family life is common among us. “This should not be,” I thought, “and yet for good reason Jesus established a new family” (cf. Mark 3:31ff). And the great sadness drew nearer to me.
And then the crashing, thundering waves of sadness overwhelmed me, as I pondered and listened, as I read and viewed the horror of Hamas and Israel. That is, as I reviewed the millennia-long hatreds and animosities characteristic of that sacred land, of the children who claim Abraham as father, I had not the wherewithal to determine who was right or wrong, and where both are tragically wrong and right. And then there’s Ukraine and Russia, with the possibility of increased starvation, not only in Ukraine but throughout the world’s impoverished regions.
I know I tend to be melancholic—would that I was sanguine—nonetheless I cannot dismiss what I know to be true: something is terribly wrong with our world ... with us, with me. Thus I understand those who ask and charge: “If a good God exists, how can all these instances of sorrow and pain remain? How?” And I too ask, as I’m sure Jesus’ first disciples sadly asked (Luke 24:17ff.); but then, not as a Pollyanna palliative, I remember the Cross and the One, who is characterized by pain and suffering; the One who brings hope, love, and life out of “the something wrong.” He has not removed the wrong; He has been transforming it.
With sadness and hope,
Stan