We hold joy and sorrow together

Last updated on: March 23, 2015 at 5:05 pm by Teresa Blythe

We hold joy and sorrow together 2015-03-23T17:05:56-08:00 Teresa Blythe

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Ducks in Steele Park downtown Phoenix

One of the hardest aspects of life is to hold onto joy while the world around us is teeming with violence.

Last Wednesday morning I was having a leisurely prayer time after which I clicked on Google News to discover that a man had gone on a shooting spree in Mesa, AZ just 20 miles east of my house at the same time I was meditating.

Just a few blocks from my house is a lovely park with a duck pond, historic buildings and dog run. Steele Park is the kind of place you can contemplatively meander, take a nice run or be still. It’s also the location of one of Arizona’s worst examples of discrimination and injustice to Native Americans. It’s the place where young Indians were warehoused in a boarding school designed to “kill the Indian to save the human.”

In spiritual direction, many times people want answers. How do I hold the pain I see in the world with my moments of joy? How can I be at peace when others are imprisoned, beaten, killed or having their basic human rights violated?

No spiritual director I know has answers for these questions. We are just like everyone else. We hold our joy and sorrow together, hoping that a good God can and will bring all good things together somehow and someday.

When faced with these questions, it is sometimes helpful to remember how many times and how many ways ancient people called out to God or the gods (however they understood the source of life) lamenting the injustice, the pain and the suffering. “How long, O Lord, must we wait for deliverance?” the prophets of Israel would ask.

One of the benefits of meditation — concentrating on one good thing such as your breath, a word or a sound — is that it doesn’t require us to have any answers. It helps us hold all of what we feel without having to think it through or figure it out.

May you hold onto the deepest joy in the midst of sorrow this Spring.

Photo by Teresa Blythe 2015

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