Great Joys, Like Griefs, Are Silent
Great joys, like griefs, are silent. —Shackerley Marmion
Great griefs are silent. Not that they should be otherwise, or even could be otherwise. Great grief sometimes must run its course before the eye of God, until His private medicines reduce the fever. A man does not want to be cheered up into a fake joy. That is an insult to his humanity. It is a cruel thing indeed for a man to demand a perpetual smile from his neighbor. Righteous Job pleads for silence, “leave me alone; for my days are vanity”1
The deepest griefs are silent and personal. They are not shared, save by our suffering Savior and by the great cloud of witnesses. The sting is in the solitude. If you were to weep, someone would console, even if only out of an uncomfortable sense of social obligation. But silent griefs give no invitation.
I spoke about this at length in my post The Seafarer:
The worst aspect of any man’s suffering is facing it alone. I do not mean literally alone in the sense of proximity to other humans, although that is sometimes part of it. But I mean an internal loneliness, where the depth of your suffering is known to you, and you alone. When your eyes are the only ones that see your hands gripping the oars, pulling, and pulling, and pulling. When your fingers are the only ones aching.
But the deepest joys are also silent. A man can laugh at simple and common delights; he does not know whether it is even appropriate to speak about heavier joys. C.S. Lewis called Joy the language of Heaven. And when we hear it spoken most clearly, we find ourselves shutting our mouths to listen. “ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory…”3
I think about the occasional gratitude that overflows in my heart for a simple thing like coffee or oak trees. I think about the joys of marrying my wife. I think about certain times in my relationship with God when there has been inexplicable joy in the Holy Spirit. I can’t fully explain some of the joys there. These joys are real, but that does not make them explicable. Great joy is mysterious, like a good dream in a deep sleep.
In the things of God, we often find a solemn joy. Some of my most joyful moments have been in very solemn times of worship. Good Friday, while somber, has a numinous, holy joy to it. I can remember one of my first very conscious moments of joy in the Lord, the kind of joy where I could not stop smiling. I was fourteen years old, standing in church, hearing the solemn words of institution: “Take, eat. This is My Body…”4 It brought a joy that I could not explain. I felt that I had learned a secret, but a secret that was open to all to come and know. I bore in my heart a silent joy, that could only overflow heavenward in silent praise.
This is one of the paradoxes of Christian worship. It is done in the fear of God: Lord, have mercy, but overflows in familial love: Our Father… It starts in silence, but results in singing. It is a small foretaste of the wedding supper of Christ and His Bride. A wedding ceremony is solemn but it is also cheerful. It is serious, but far from boring. It is weighty, but there is joy there: the kind of joy where people will shed a tear. Few sane people shed a tear with circus music. It is a solemn, silent joy, but it is also a celebratory joy. It starts with silence, but it results in shouts and dancing at the reception.
Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.5
This quote, “Great joys, like griefs, are silent”, was brought to my attention last week, as my sister-in-law was thumbing through my copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and reading out ones she found interesting. I was reminded how helpful a quotation book like that is to spark curiosity, especially for those of us who are a bit late to the game when it comes to classical education and the canon of Western literature. I wrote a post about why you should read books of quotations here.
Job 7:16
See my posts The Seafarer and The Wanderer.
1 Peter 1:8
Matthew 26:26. See my post Take & Eat
Revelation 19:9
Happiness and sorrow spin around, chasing each other like pagan deities of sun and moon.
We shall be happy, we shall be sad. We are told to weep with those who weep, laugh with those laughing, so it follows those things in their place are licit.
Joy however, that knowing of salvation, of Him being Good, Beautiful and True will sustain us even through the icy claws of helpless depression.
We cannot be happy all the time, we can make good effort to be frequently morose, but Joy can be found even in the worst of times.
“ A wedding ceremony is solemn but it is also cheerful. It is serious, but far from boring. It is weighty, but there is joy there: the kind of joy where people will shed a tear.”
The older I get, the longer I’m married, the more Christian weddings I get to attend, the more is impressed upon me the profound truth/depth/reality of the wedding imagery in the Bible, from Genesis to Ephesians to Revelation. It’s not just a metaphor, it’s a profound truth, and there is so much deep and abiding joy in recognizing it and pursuing it in your life - both in trying to love your wife as Christ loves the Church, but also in the comfort of knowing that you are a beloved child of you Heavenly Father. It’s no surprise that as our culture lost its sense of the importance/beauty/permanence of marriage, it lost its sense of joy. Anyway, beautiful reflection, thank you so much.