Is sorrow a sin?

"It's like my wife is calling me from the cockpit," a friend once explained, "and my instinct is to help her land the plane. But then she gets mad and says I don't listen. I'm only trying to help solve her problem. It took me a long time to figure out that sometimes she just needs to fly around up there for a while."

Sometimes when my wife talks to me about a struggle, I'll ask if she's looking for help landing the plane or if she needs to fly around. In other words, does she want help fixing a problem or does she want someone to just listen and commiserate? I used to think it solely a male tendency, this instinct for classifying things as problems and then setting about finding solutions to them. But in my wife's friendships I'm seeing that women are by no means immune to this temptation.

It's almost as if there is a strain of Christianity that holds that sorrow is an aberration caused by a fault in its sufferer and therefore must be remedied. This fix usually involves, in my wife's experience with some of her Christian friends, a remonstration to pray more and perhaps to read a spiritual book. There's no room in this worldview for just flying the plane.

This is odd because I don't think a walk with Christ can avoid sorrow. We are being refined. We are running a race. We are engaged in a great conflict. What war does not bring sorrow? It's almost as if some of my wife's friends believe sorrow is sin. Count it all joy, one tone-deaf friend once reminded her months after our daughter died. This is part and parcel with the modern funeral style, which seems to be that a good Christian browbeats people into rejoicing.

As my wife wisely notes, there's no room in this worldview for duality. Christ has won the victory, but we are still working out our salvation with fear and trembling. There is the peace that surpasses all understanding, yet there is also the dark night of the soul. Count it all joy, instructs the same Bible that says of Jesus that he wept at the sight of a dead friend. There is joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy.

We are waging a battle, each of us fitting and re-fitting the yoke of Christ to our shoulders, each of us working out salvation. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes we don't feel God is very close at all, or we feel like the burden of this marriage or this job or these children is just too much, that we are going to snap if we have to carry them one further step. For many of us, the last mistake we want to make in that situation is to tell the wrong Christian friend how we really are, that we just feel beat up and forgotten and not at all where we thought we would be. In our darkest times, we just can't bear the resulting lecture.

My wife used to share this pick-yourself-up-by-your-spiritual-bootstraps mentality. She used to dish it out to others, as well as invite it. But now she is learning to be careful with whom she shares her struggles, as well as having greater compassion for those who struggle. Maybe the solution to heartache isn't redoubled prayer and another Christian book after all. Maybe there is no short-term solution to heartache. Maybe sometimes our hearts ache because the world aches, because we are not home, because there is still work to be done and we are so very tired.

All this makes me wonder how many other Christians do the same, and whether that just feeds the delusion that good Christians don't have sorrowful times in the desert. In other words, if everyone around you is pretending like he's happy and life is bliss then you're inclined to pretend the same thing. Wouldn't it be a shame if our churches were filled with far greater sorrow than we knew, only most of us were hiding it for fear of not fitting in?