Sorrow Prepares You for Joy

“Sorrow prepares you for joy.
It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter.
It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place.
It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow.
Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”

- Rumi

Rumi speaks truth about sorrow preparing joy, and I don’t like it. I want joy to simply be a gift received and treasured and enjoyed for years to come, with no sorrow needed. Surely there is enough room in my house already without sweeping everything out. I can just move somethings around. Oh Rumi, you are correct – no new green leaves without the old, yellow ones falling off. No new roots will grow if old rotten roots remain. But must my heart be shaken, shaken for those leaves to fall? Must all the rotten roots be pulled up? Surely there is a better, easier path.

Christmas is coming. A time to sing joy to the world. Advent is the time of preparing for that joy, of creating space for joy to enter. Must Advent then be a time of welcoming sorrow? A time of shaking leaves and pulling rotten roots. What an interesting view of Advent.

I often think of the season of Advent as a time of preparing for the day of Christmas – putting out the decorations, buying the gifts, planning the family gatherings, asking why I need God to be incarnated into my world. Advent is often the busiest time of the year, filled with many demands. I wonder if there is space for joy.

Rumi, the Sufi mystic, offers a different approach to Advent. Sit with the sorrow. 2020 has seen much sorrow. It has been a year of violent sweeping. Allow the sorrow to sweep everything out of the house, especially the sense that we are in control of what happens to us and nothing can stop us, not even a pandemic. Over 250,000 have died from COVID and need to be mourned. We have been locked in our homes and out of our churches and the Retreat House. Can the sorrow over COVID create room for joy? Yes, it can.

Allow the sorrow to shake loose the leaves of how things were to create space for something new to grow. Allow the sorrow to till the soil, remove the rotten roots of racism, elitism, exceptionalism so some new roots can take root. In sitting with the sorrow, allowing the sorrow to do its work, the yearning for joy will be known and will grow, if we stay present. Then we can wait for the Lord and the new day of joy that will break forth.

Clay Brantley

RH Director

This excerpt is part of Retreat House’s Daily Light series. To sign up to receive these, email us.