Χαρμολύπη Bright Sadness

Can we truly experience joy right now in these times of such turmoil, division, uncertainty and fear? The American poet and Orthodox convert, Scott Cairns writes in a chapter of God For Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Lent and Easter:

…. at first, I was surely among the crew that Father Alexander Schmemann acknowledges when he writes (in his amazing and very helpful book, Great Lent), “For many, if not for the majority of Orthodox Christians, Lent consists of a number of formal, predominantly negative, rules and prescriptions…. Such is the degree of our alienation from the real spirit of the Church that it is almost impossible for us to understand that there is ‘something else’ in Lent—something without which all these prescriptions lose much of their meaning.”

Father Schmemann goes on to explain that this “something else” is another disposition altogether. He characterizes it as an “atmosphere,” a “climate,” and “a state of mind, soul, and spirit.” In my own experience -which, as I say, required some years of practice before I so much as noticed – Lent can become an incentive and a powerful means by which we can enter the kingdom of God, even as we abide here on earth.

This disposition is the Χαρμολύπη – the bright-sadness – of which the fathers and the mothers speak. Even in the dryness of our desert journey, we are offered a sustaining taste of the sweet, the living waters. Even amid the gloom, we apprehend a glimmer of the light.

This bright sadness permeates much of the wonderful poetry of the Lenten Triodion. These hymns fill our liturgical services with a sadness that is at once bitter, as we consider the wretched state we find ourselves in, and yet leavened with joy, the bright promise of God’s presence and forgiveness.

Bright sadness is connected with tender-heartedness (умиление) that is, compassion, a compassionate heart, from out of which a loving gaze em- braces the suffering of others. What begins as something inward, and deeply personal – being touched by the poetry and melodies of bright sadness – is meant to be a source or well-spring of empathy, of mercy and forgiveness, of loving acts.

Father John Breck wrote in a meditation many years ago: Bright sadness may be the most powerful and important experience we can know. It brings to our mind and heart, in the most direct and personal way, the ultimate purpose of our life and the object or end of our most passionate desire.