Joy Sorrow's Flower (From Christian Wiman)



When I was younger, joy and sorrow lived in separate places.  Joy on the mountain top, sorrow in the muddy fields.  Each day, my task was to scrape my up to the mountain top, clawing to the top with fingertips and toes, tying myself in with a rope if I made it so that I might live in that bliss, that expanse, that height.  By days end, midday if I am honest, I was already sliding back down into the muddy fields, doubt, failures, misunderstandings and pain prying my bloodied fingers from the rough granite, hopes dashed in the slam back to the ground. I thought that if I could find the right job, the perfect lover, the beautiful body, that I might live on the mountain with joy my constant companion. The inevitable (daily) failures were demoralizing but not entirely.  Like Sisyphus, each bright morning I made my way back up the mountain with the hope, courage, imagination. Except on those days when I couldn’t get out of bed.

The spiritual journey of my life, these last thirty years, has entailed the piecing together of these seemingly separate geographies of joy and sorrow into one ever renewing and integrated land.  It has been about building up the physical, physiological, nervine, emotional, and intellectual strength to hold both joy and sorrow in the ways they unfold together throughout a life.  To see, feel, know, experience how joy and sorrow are not separate but in fact part of the same body of life is the great surprise and prize. Like the lungs and the heart, they exist in an infinite interchanging of longing and belonging, coming and going in a giving each other life.  In this interchange God/life itself grows, matures, expands, and ripens us. 

The journey is not without its obstacles.  Obstacles, like the heaving heartbeat and breathing that exertion entails, strengthens us so that we might be broken open and brought back together more expansively again. 

Living in this interchange of joy and sorrow, life becomes a wordless prayer which is to say an offering as much as a harvest, a giving as much as a receiving, an opening as much as a closing. As sorrow, the great tenderizing of the heart, prepares the way for the joy, the joy renews and expands our heart to hold the sorrow. I am no longer clinging to the side of the mountain, scraping my way up to the exalting top.  I take one step and then another through the kitchen, around the garden path, over the urban sidewalk, into and out of the Himalayas, over to the bedside, joy and sorrow a splendid harmonizing accompaniment, the heartbeat with the breath. 


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