Let us lay hold of sorrow.
Do not be afraid of it, for when grasped firmly, like the nettle, it never stings. The life that has not known and accepted sorrow is strangely crude and untaught. It can neither help nor teach, for it has never learned. The life that has spurned the lesson of sorrow, or failed to read it right, is cold and hard. But the life that has been disciplined by sorrow is courageous, and full of holy and gentle love. Without sorrow life glares. It has neither half-tones nor merciful shadows. Disappointment, in life, is inevitable. Sharp sorrow, at one time or another, will come to each of us, if indeed it has not already come. But this same sorrow is a gentle teacher, and reveals many things that would otherwise be hard to understand.
Sorrow passes. “See,” says a keen observer, “how little trace a single sorrow, even a great one, leaves in any life.” He did not mean that the influence of sorrow is slight. He only meant that life is greater than sorrow, and need not be overborne by it. Says Emerson, “All loss, all gain, is particular: … it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered. The infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.”
There is no new sorrow. We shall be called upon to bear nothing that has not been borne before. Does not this thought quiet the wild clamor of life? Shall we murmur at our lot when unnumbered mourning hearts, as sensitive, as true, as loving, as our own, have been breaking under the weight of the same sorrow that oppresses us today; have met this grief of ours, whatever it may be, and have conquered it? Shouldn’t we now in turn try to bear the cross more bravely than any that have gone before, that we may give strength and courage to the weary ones who must bear it after us?
Every day of meeting sorrow superbly makes the life grander. Every tear that falls from one’s own eyes gives a deeper tenderness of look, of touch, of word, that shall soothe another’s woe. Sorrow is not given to us alone that we may mourn. It is given to us that, having felt, suffered, wept, we may be able to understand, love, bless.
Tags: life lessons, worthwhile
