Bittersweet — Chapter 1: What is Sadness Good For?

Cain (author of the book Bittersweet) immediately hooked me in the first chapter by talking about one of my favorite Pixar movies: Inside Out. She mentioned that the early edits for the film actually placed more narrative weight upon the character of Fear, rather than Sadness. After a screen test, the creative team realized that Fear had very little to teach Joy (the main character of the movie). The director, Pete Doctor, started to panic about the film… and he hit a patch of sadness in his own life. It was in the midst of this sadness that he came to a realization: “The real reason for his emotions — for all our emotions — is to connect us. And Sadness, of all the emotions, was the ultimate bonding agent (p.4).” This led him to rewrite the film — ultimately because Sadness had more to teach Joy than Fear did.

Pete Doctor asked a psychology professor to help consult as he worked on the film. This professor helped him identify the main function of each human emotion. According to this professor… fear helps you stay safe; anger keeps you from being taken advantage of, and sadness helps us develop muscles of compassion (Cain points out that compassion literally means “to suffer together.”) Sadness actually has the ability to draw us closer together because we learn to share our suffering together. Cain goes in a few different directions in the rest of the chapter one… but I want to riff on this last idea for the rest of the post.

What is so interesting to me about sadness being a bonding agent is that we really see this tangibly throughout the scriptures. There is a whole collection of Psalms dedicated to lament (which is a passionate expression of grief or sorrow). In fact, there’s a whole book, written by Jeremiah, called Lamentations. Even Jesus gives us an example of holy lament when he expresses emotion over the death of Lazarus. Sadness is difficult to walk through, but there is something sacred that can be found within it: I believe both empathy and perseverance are found there. I wonder if this is why the psalmists normalize lament — to create contexts in which whole communities come together to mourn a shared tragedy — so that they are then unified in purpose through empathy and compassion.

I’ve noticed that the American evangelical church struggles with lament. I’ve been guilty of this — but I find that in our public worship services — when we read a Psalm… we will often skip over the troublesome passages… passages that I call ‘howl at the moon’ type passages. We are not always comfortable with those passages that contain raw emotion — passages that question where God is in the pain or if He will ever intervene. I wonder if this is a muscle we need to begin working on again. Particularly if lament can help us “see” and empathize with each other in deeper ways. In these polarizing times, it would be quite beautiful to see the church lead the way in demonstrating empathy, love and compassion through the discipline of lament/sadness. So often we respond to things with offense/anger first. There is absolutely a place for righteous anger… but I wonder how much more productive our righteous anger would be if it were informed and shaped first by a discipline of lament.