Bright Sadness

So, instead of calling my blog, 40 Days (see below), I called it Bright Sadness. What the heck is Bright Sadness?

It's an expression from the Orthodox Church. I found this sermon which expresses it beautifully:

The beautiful expression, “bright sadness,” came back to me with special poignancy during Holy Week this year. In Greek the compound noun is charmolypê, variously translated “bitter joy,” “joyful mourning,” or “affliction that leads to joy.” It expresses what the Fathers of the Church call an “antinomy,” a truth that defies normal logic. The word is an oxymoron of sorts, which describes a paradoxical spiritual state characterized by a profound mingling of joy and grief. St. John of Sinai formulates the idea in the seventh step of his Ladder of Divine Ascent, where he speaks of it as “the blessed joy-grief of holy compunction.”

In his classic work, Great Lent, Fr Alexander Schmemann describes “Sad brightness” as “the sadness of my exile, of the waste I have made of my life; the brightness of God’s presence and forgiveness, the joy of the recovered desire for God, the peace of the recovered home.”

Partly I like that quote because it's got all those fancy words in it that we don't get to use every day: antimony, oxymoron, compunction. And I love the Greek word for bright sadness: charmolype. Which incidentally would be pronounced "karmoloopay". Sounds like the name for an alternative-rock music festival.

I also feel like Schmemann could have been describing my life with these words: "the sadness of my exile, the waste I have made of my life, ... the joy of the recovered desire for God, the peace of the recovered home."