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OPINION (12 March) : The joy of sadness
By BY COLLEEN O'REILLY *
March 12, 2008
Colleen O'Reilly* Colleen O'Reilly*

The  nights are cooling down here in Melbourne.

The oppressive heat of Summer has gone and the days are milder, sometimes even on the cool side.

The long twilight evenings are noticeably shorter now and autumn is over the horizon.

It's making me feel a bit sad this year to think that soon daylight saving will end and the mornings and the evenings will be dark for a season. 

Now, I know it's not as bad as living further south or in the northern hemisphere.

I well recall dark afternoons in wintry London when lights are needed before four o'clock.

And I've experienced mornings in midwinter Scotland where the sun barely touches the frost before it starts disappearing. As a visitor it can be exotic and exciting, but a bit confusing given the speed of travel.

Once I flew to Switzerland from Australia in January.  While my eyes were feasting on chocolate box snow scenes my head was full of images of the beach!

At first when I noticed my new seasonal sadness I wondered if I was just getting old.

After all the seasons of the year remind us that we too have our season and that all things in creation have finite lifetimes.

Coming to terms with mortality is one of the challenges of life and a great spiritual liberation - so I hear - for those who manage to come out the other side of the struggle. And truth to tell I am getting old - my age ought not be called 'the middle' by any stretch of my imagination or medical optimism.

Then I felt guilty about my sadness. After all, we Australians pretty much play act at winter even in Melbourne.

Think of people living in the places of permanent night during the coldest months of the year. They have real cause to complain if they choose.

One of my Scottish nieces is affected by their Winter and plans to migrate to cope. Perhaps my flat wintry spirit is just indulgent. A person like me ought to get over it!

But then, I also reflect on how little permission we have these days to feel just plain sad about things that rightly make us sad - or should if we are even half alive! 

A parish priest sees plenty of daily sadness.

Probably other professionals do too but perhaps they lack the words or the freedom to voice their feelings in the workplace except around the kitchenette and then only to a trusted few.

Talking to some people ought to leave us sad and aching that life is as it is.

There's the exhausted wife whose husband really must go to the high care unit in the nursing home.

Or the young couple whose longed-for baby just can't be conceived.

Or there's the husband who takes a decade to relinquish his wife's ashes to the memorial garden and the parents and grandparents and the sisters and brothers who bring those of the young man who took his own life.

If bearing one another's burdens as Paul urges is to be real, should we be surprised that we bear another's sadness, and feel our own, for a couple of days at a time? 

Yes, I know there is real and enduring depression and that it is more common than we care to acknowledge.

But perhaps there would be less severe depression if we let go the pressure to be relentlessly happy all the time.

Each year as Lent deepens and the events of Holy Week unfold in our readings and worship I immerse myself in the story and experience what I once heard called 'the joy of melancholy'. 

It is just plain sad that Jesus was hated by those who most needed what he offered; it is just plain sad that one of his own handed him over for nothing more than money it seems; it's just plain sad that the women of Jerusalem who had good cause to love him met him on the way to his death and it's just plain heartbreakingly sad that his mother was there when he died and perhaps when his body was swaddled one last time in a shroud for his burial.

Of course, the passion is played out daily around the world and in the streets and neighbourhoods near where we live.

And while there are proper boundaries in accompanying others in grief, perhaps there are also proper admissions of grief that we fail to do within our own hearts to our cost.

Try entering the familiar story and let the sheer human sadness of the drama seep into you as you prepare for the astonishing shock of Easter morning and the joy that comes with it.

So I plan to be more open about my seasonal sadness.

It's not a sign that I'm on the skids or in need of particular help. It's a sign that I'm alive and can embrace the ways things are while enjoying the little things that really matter such as the kind hand on a shoulder or the comfortable silence of waiting for another to say what they need to.

I'll pop a champagne cork at the offertory and fill the chalices with sparkling red on Easter day because sadness may endure for a night but joy really does come with the new day's dawning throughout the whole creation.

At home it's time to shake out the Winter dressing gown and accept that seasons turn just as lives are completed to await God's fulfilment.

And God saw that everything was good.

 

*Dr Colleen O'Reilly is the vicar of St George's Malvern and a canon of St Paul's cathedral in

Melbourne Diocese