The Stars in Our Tears

Some time ago, I wrote a post about the beginning of the Pixar movie Inside Out, which portrayed the profound and fundamental happiness that marked the beginning of a person’s life. Back then, drawing upon D.L. Schindler’s Ordering Love and R.J. Snell’s Acedia and Its Discontents, I wrote about how there is a fundamental delight that underwrote not only the creation of individual persons, but also in the establishment of entire universe. This delight, in turn, also formed the thread that connected God and humanity, since both, in their own ways, expressed delight in the creatures that emerged at the dawn of the cosmos.

What I did not cover in that post, however, was the place of joy’s opposite. At the time of writing my last post, I was probably awkwardly trying to steer clear of dealing with the issue of sadness and its place in a universe that is undergirded by joy. Back then, I was probably touched by some theological version of toxic positivity, and probably did not have an adequate appreciation of a divine paradox that lay within the principle of divine simplicity. At that time, I had taken on an idea within Rebecca DeYoung’s very helpful book, Glittering Vices, in a very unhelpful way. In that book, DeYoung made a note about the place of sadness not only as an emotional state, but as a vice that, according to the ancient Egyptian author Evagrius of Pontus, leads to a spiritual death. So serious was sadness taken that it was treated as a capital vice in the ancient world. Given the harm that sadness could cause, I dared not associate it with any divine working.

Fortunately, Inside Out did not share my qualms and took the issue head on, particularly at the ending of the film (This film is probably old enough but still, Spoiler Alert!!!).

What is interesting about the movie’s ending is that of all the emotions, it is Sadness that Joy engages with most substantially. In particular, it is Joy and Sadness together that produce the core memories - an intermingling of both happiness with sadness - in the mind of Riley, the movie’s slightly more obscured key character.

When I first saw the movie, I thought such an ending was a cop out, a compromise that, like me, avoided dealing with the problem of sadness by just glibly saying “eh, it is a part of life so live with it”. However, my mind is now changed, thanks to a new book I acquired and another old text that I revisited.

The first text was Joy Marie Clarkson’s new book Aggressively Happy. In the first chapter of her book, Clarkson wrote about the need to become familiar with sadness. The reason for this is not merely to be stoic and face harsh realities, and it is not simply because we need to know the opposites of things, including happiness. The profound insight that Clarkson alerted me to was the insight that, in a strange way, happiness and sadness both emit from the same wellspring. As she puts it movingly in her chapter:

Sadness tells me how precious the world is. She tells me how deeply she has loved, how dearly she has hoped, how fully she has trusted. She tells me that all those hopes meant something, pointed to the gladness beating at the heart of the world. She is indignant because she knows her birthright: wholeness, unity, growth. She weeps not because loss meant nothing, but because it meant a great, great deal. Her tears testify to the world we were meant for…

The second text was a short passage from the 8th century mystic Isaac the Syrian, who picked on a theme within the psalms concerning tears. Tears, thought Isaac, represented a stepping into a significant liminal space. The Psalms speak of tears as the meeting point between heaven and earth (Psalm 34:18), and even the a resetting of a time, that takes us back to the beginnings of the universe (Psalm 126:6-7). Nowhere is this more vividly captured than in a passage where Isaac writes:

The fruits of the inner man begin only with the shedding of tears. When you reach the place of tears, then know that your spirit has come out from the prison of this world and has set its foot upon the path that leads to the new age. Your spirit begins at this moment to breathe the wonderful air which is there, and it starts to shed tears. The moment for the birth of the spiritual child is now at hand…

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