Pints With Aquinas - Are Christians Allowed to be Sad? w/ Fr. Gregory Pine O.P.

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Fr. Pine talks about joy and emotion in the Christian life. 🟣 Join Us on Locals (before we get banned on YT): https://mattfradd.locals.com/ 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F ✝️ Show Sponsor: https://hallow.com/mattfradd 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd We get a small kick back from affiliate links.

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph and this is Pines with Aquinas. In this episode I'd like to talk a little bit about sadness. Why? Well, because we talk often about joy and happiness, at least we do in Christian conversations. So you'll hear people quote John 10, 10, I came that they might have life and have it abundantly, and then you'll hear them say that Christians ought always to be joyful and or happy Depending on how they define those terms and then you might experience some sadness in your life and then be led to ask

Does this mean that I am a bad person or a bad Christian? Is this something blameworthy or culpable? What am I to do with my sadness? Should I banish it or should I reconcile it or how do I go forward? So I want to address ourselves to these types of questions, draw some distinctions so that way we can engage with our lives more fruitfully, more profitably, and ultimately more happily. So here we go. Okay, so you will have probably heard all of these terms described or defined in a variety of ways.

So let's say just a brief word about happiness and joy, and then go from there to sadness and describe why it might in fact be appropriate, why I think it's appropriate to experience some sadness in life, provided it is as the Lord intends and as we are meant to experience it. So joy, you'll hear St. Thomas describe things like delights or yeah, joy I guess would be the words for it when he talks about the passions. So he's talking about our kind of basic response to certain goods and how that might resonate in the higher registers of our human lives. And when he describes it he basically means

I love something, right? It fits for me, it's pleasant to me lives and when he describes it he basically means I love something right it fits for me it's pleasant to me and when I experience a kind of joy or when I experience a kind of delight it's because the thing is present to me because I have acquired it or because I have access to it so that's what he means it's just a good that I love is present to me now when he's talking about happiness and the terminology here is a little bit different but when when he's talking about happiness, he's describing our engagement with the good which fulfills us as a human being, with which we fit or which represents our flourishing, and it draws us or engages us in such a way that we're banging on all cylinders, right? We're fully alive. We're enjoying it as the fruit of some highest operation of our highest

powers. So it's something that we're engaging with by our minds and by our hearts and it's drawing out all of our native resources and beyond such that we experience the very fullness for which we were intended. So when we talk about happiness obviously we're talking about something that only awaits us in its entirety or in its perfection in heaven. But we can experience something of an imperfect happiness whilst here on earth. The reasons for its imperfection are many. I mean for one, we just need to interrupt our human operation with frequency because you got to like sleep and stuff

like that. But also here on earth we always can risk the loss or the lessening of certain goods so there's a kind of volatility or there's a kind of craziness to human life which makes it so that we're never fully secure in our possession of the good and as a result of which we experience it as something kind of anxiety inducing so it might be the case you know a certain good is present to you but the prospect of full engagement or full happiness is always somewhat tenuous. So we ask God obviously for the strength to see us through to that end, through to that full flourishing which lies in store, but ultimately it's something that we need to

entrust to Him and hope and then just use those means that He appoints. So then within this setting we might have a sense for why happiness could befall because you know you can lose the good. And here we're talking about goods of nature and goods of supernature. Like at the level of nature, for instance, it's totally appropriate to love people. Like to love members of your family and your friends

and even those further afield. And for instance, when they suffer some illness or when they, God forbid, die, but they will die, we experience that as a genuine loss. So a good that was present to us is no longer present to us. Okay? We have been deprived of it, we've been robbed of it, maybe to speak a little more, I don't know, intensely or intimately. And as a result of which, we experience a sadness. So when we talk about sadness, what we're talking about, and St. Thomas has two words for that, kind of the more basic response he calls dolore, like pain, and the more, I don't know, elevated

response, that response which resonates through a whole humanity he calls tristizia, right? So just these different aspects of sadness. They're just a recognition that the thing for which I was made, or thing to which I am attached, even if not yet purely or perfectly, is lost. And that is for me a source of great sadness. So like St. Augustine describes the loss of his friend from, it's either Tagust or Carthage, I think it's Tagust, and like how that was so devastating for him. Now later in the retractions he describes how this was excessive because I had poured my heart out and I somewhat repent of the the lengths to which I went in experiencing it, also in describing it. But still, okay, that's just a very basic thing. And then when it comes to the order of super nature,

right, we can lose the life of grace. If the life of grace is taken to its term beyond the here and now, right, it comes to its perfection in glory, but we can sin, and that's terrible, and we can lose the life of grace. So Léon Bloy will say the only tragedy of human life is to not become a saint. But that's a real tragedy and it remains a possibility. It remains a prospect. And we can know that to be the case. And we can experience it, you know, on behalf of others, on behalf of ourselves, or just in ourselves, that tenuousness or that risk.

And then we can see people choose against God, and that can be an occasion of sadness. We can see people blaspheme or desecrate the Blessed Sacrament or just make a mockery of the faith in general. And that's sad, because these things for which we're made, that we're intended to rest in, to enjoy, to come to their term in our full flourishing in heaven, are treated with violence or disrespect or not well. So I think that we experience some sadness. And is that consonant with our Christian vocation? I think the answer is yes. I think that's an appropriate response. So I don't think that you need to feel pressure or culpability or blameworthiness on account of the fact that you experience some sadness. The question then is what do we do with that sadness? And I think that this is where

it's most important, because that sadness is intended to be joined to, or united with, the sadness of our Lord Jesus Christ, who experiences genuine sadness in his humanity on account of the fact that he suffers and dies and is buried, right, and descends into hell. These are all terrible things that he experiences, but he experiences them genuinely in our humanity, and so they become a privileged place of encounter with our own sadness. So we are not meant to rest in our sadness or despair of the possibility that we can ever depart from our sadness or fear that we will always be compassed about by sadness. No, there remains a kind of hope and even an audacity which should encourage in us a response which is more, I don't know, forward thinking or

at least more Christ-ward thinking. So in that, even whilst recognizing that this might last for some time, we seek to unite it with him, not so only that he might resolve it or banish it, but that he might inhabit it, that he might fill it with his presence, so that our Lord will answer this human questioning about the meaning of suffering, as St. John Paul II writes, not once and for all or in the abstract but insofar as we become partakers of his suffering and it's in that, it's in that union that we get something better, right? Something bigger, something yet more excellent still, which is to say our Lord, we get his presence which is the only thing that we're ever really promised here in the Christian

life but which can situate and help us to make sense of our present sadnesses again It doesn't explain them away or entirely resolve them The world remains a place of sadness a veil of tears we call it with just cause But now we can see it it becomes more transparent as it were through the lens of grace more transparent as it were through the lens of grace as something that God permits and you know as it were suffuses with the opportunity for deeper conversion and ultimately his glory and our salvation. So yes we ought to seek a certain joy and a certain happiness by engagement with those goods which animate us both naturally and supernaturally to live a life of human flourishing of Christian flourishing But we aren't meant to make an idol of joy or happiness to say to ourselves that my life only matters so much as I

experience joy or happiness Because that's not true because our Lord has taken our whole humanity to himself from top to bottom and from start to finish And so it all becomes a place in which we can encounter him and that's true even of our sadness So we shouldn't set it aside or prejudge it as something that cannot possibly bear meaning, right? We ought to seek him in the midst of it in pursuit not of like an idolatrous happiness or an idolatrous joy But in pursuit of him who is ultimately the one from whom this joy and happiness comes in turn Chesterton will say that happiness cannot be pursued,

it has to ensue. And Victor Frankl makes a very similar kind of attestation in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, that it's for us to find something meaningful or something purposeful from which we can ultimately taste the happiness that issues from it. So there are going to be seasons in your life that are happier and seasons in your life that are sadder. The point is not to make an idol of the happy or to kind of fall prey as it were to the sad, but to seek our Lord in the midst of it. So it's not for us to romanticize sadness, nor is it for us to romanticize happiness. It's for us to be honest in the face of our experience that the Lord can use it and transform it and ultimately make of it an instrument for his redeeming grace. So I would say give yourself permission to be sad, give yourself permission to be happy, give yourself permission

to be what the Lord wills that you be and seek his face always so that he can make of your life the beautiful thing which he has in his mind's eye and in his heart's intent. So in that then we have a kind of confidence that come what may, we can seek the Lord where he may be found, and he may be found indeed in the midst of our experience. So that is what I wanted to share. Thanks so much for listening. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to Pines with Aquinas and push the bell and you'll get updates when other things come out on the channel. Also if you haven't yet, do check out God's Plaining, which is a podcast that I contribute to with four other Dominican

friars with weekly episodes and sometimes bonus episodes here and there. But we talk a lot about things like this, just kind of basic, simple Christian things, how to cultivate a contemplative life in the midst of the world's difficulties. So I think that you'll find some cool things there about sadness and further refield, other things beyond. And then lastly, I wrote a book, it's called Prudence, Choose Confidently, Live Boldly. I hope that the insights there might be of service to you in your own walk with the Lord in your own journey of faith. So if you haven't yet to consider picking it up from amazon.com or osv.com

or wherever books are sold, not wherever books are sold, some places where books are sold, a very limited number of places where books are sold. Boom. Know of my prayers for you. Please pray for me and i'll look forward to chatting with you next time i'm pines with aquinas