Scripture Reference: John 16:20-22
All celebrations, and religious celebrations especially, begin with a feeling of freedom. Starting with freedom, celebrations at the same time also manifest, embody, and express the deep human thirst for freedom. However, understand that I am not speaking merely of external or political freedom, or the freedom to work, but about life itself as freedom. In reality, of course, everything ties us down to one degree or another and subjects us to somebody or something. This is one of humanity’s most basic experiences. Human beings are slaves to time, to their geography and environment, to their genetic inheritance, to their physical constitution, to climate, to the circumstances in which they live. Finally, they are slaves to life’s unpredictable circumstances and to its inescapable conclusion. The longer humans live and the further they move away from childhood, the more clearly they see how hemmed-in they are on all sides. Of course, within the limits of these boundaries, within the narrow plot of ground and time allotted to them, they assume they are somehow free. But as a person’s spirit becomes deeper and more sensitive, he or she sees more clearly how illusive and limited their freedom really is. Their sadness and longing for genuine freedom becomes deeper and deeper. “Living always in darkness and always in strife, how dark is the darkness, how narrow the strife,” wrote one poet to describe human life. The deep truth of these words is felt by all but the most coarse and vulgar, those who live for the moment and keep themselves entertained with cheap thrills and chemical escapes.
All human culture, art, and poetry is permeated with a sadness which seems to be the most human and authentic of emotions, and this sadness concerns precisely the sense of imprisonment and limitation in life, the mortality and fragility of everything in this world. Only in childhood are we unaware of this, which is why even the most impoverished childhood seems to be one continuous celebration. Life is seen as lighthearted and joyful, like an open window on a glorious spring morning, full of limitless possibilities. A person becomes an adult when this inner spirit of celebration shrinks, and in its place the perception grows that life is like a prison. Sadness and gloom suddenly enters in. Thus, no matter how a person tries to numb that sadness, if they are honest with themselves, it never goes away. The Christian experience of faith can only be understood in relation to this sadness, for this is precisely where faith takes shape, within the depths of that primal, subtle, and exalted sadness, without which a person is not a person, but an animal. In fundamental Christianity this sadness is known as “godly sorrow” (2 Corinthians 7:10), for if in spite of all their experience of restriction, fragility, and mortality human beings are still thirsting for something more, if they are never willing to accept imprisonment as the totality of human life, then we have to ask why. Why don’t they accept it? Why are they still sad, and where does that sadness come from? No other creature on earth experiences this type of sadness. Yet human beings, no matter how often experience should convince them otherwise, continue to hold onto words like immortality, eternity, spirit, freedom, joy; they continue to use them as if they were words of exorcism. Thus art, which reflects human sadness, becomes the expression of the impossible dream of breaking through to that “something more,” which earthly experience cannot even begin to imagine. “Our hearts are restless,” wrote St Augustine, “until they rest in You [God].” Godly sorrow is this sadness and longing for freedom.
To Be Continued
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
You must be logged in to post a comment.