Tuesdays in Advent 3*

Some Non-Googled Thoughts about Joy

Dec 16, 2025

“Weeping may remain for a night, but joy comes with the morning” (Proverbs 30:5).

The first time I read this passage, it struck me that this was proof that the ancients suffered from insomnia. One medieval writer had a more poetic rendering for it, calling it “the dark night of the soul.”

But they also had a certain view of this experience that led them to think something else: it, the weeping, didn’t last.

Given the tragedies of the last few days, with the murders of students finishing exams at Brown University and innocent people in Australia celebrating Hanukkah, it may not seem that the weeping doesn’t last. But the ancients had this way of asserting that, no matter how it looks, evil doesn’t have the power of permanence.

It is mostly a matter of faith for many, that buried deep in the advent season is this idea that all of the evil of temporary, temporal powers will somehow, one day, collapse. We see the line from Isaiah that the government will be on his shoulders. Christians always take that to mean Christ’s shoulders. Again, this is an article of faith that I don’t see very clearly most of the time, especially when theocracies lead to so much evil all by themselves.

The passage above isn’t a part of the Advent liturgy, really, so Google doesn’t say any of this. It gives the usual glosses on what the passage above means, and as I am doing here, words lead to more words. But the meaning is clear enough: weeping, pain, and sorrow are temporary. Like night, they give in to day.

A good gloss might also note, but doesn’t, that weeping, and not the avoidance of weeping, is what leads to morning. Note that the passage doesn’t say that joy comes from denial, from “being a stoic,” or “laughing nervously and not crying,” or “hanging on,” or “faking it till you make it” leads to joy. It says that “weeping” does, and it “may remain for a night.”

When we lost our son, I experienced weeping for three days, from Friday and Saturday to Sunday.

And then, on Monday morning, I opened my eyes and realized I wasn’t weeping. I also wasn’t looking out on a sunny morning. It was gray. Our blinds were closed. And I was not suddenly ready to leap out of bed and meet the day.

But I wasn’t crying anymore. At first I thought that was weird. I thought something was wrong with me. I thought I was in denial.

And I did weep again. But not like I did those first three days.

What happened to me sort of follows a pattern that is actually an important part of the Jewish rite of Sitting Shiva. The first three days of the seven day period are focused especially on loss and all that it means. This is the opposite of all those things we say at our Celebration of Life services: “Sonny is just in heaven now laughing it up with Aunt Rose.” Or “Time will heal” or “He’s in such a better place now,” all things we say that are really meant to get us to stop mourning.

The focus I get from this Old Testament passage and from reading about Shiva is that we should weep. When we do this, we are honoring those we’ve lost. But also, we do this with intensity so that we will begin, after three days, to move back toward life.

As Anita Diamant writes, the first seven days become “a time and place for facing the full impact of death, supported by family and friends. When this period ends, the mourner leaves the private sanctuary of shiva to take up the responsibilities of family and work” (87).

The theme for this third week of Advent is joy. This joy is based on celebrating the advent of a coming new creation found in the hope, peace, and joy of a newborn we’ve yet to know, and who is yet, in this season, to know and represent us somehow in our suffering. (The second half of this sentence is me adding my own gloss.)

I refuse to accept that if we are weeping in this advent season, we are somehow not being people of faith. Instead, I have come to think that sadness means that we are not that far away from what the season is about. We may actually be appropriate. From the past, we know that life has offered more to us than what we now experience. The weeping, which will not last, is the path to something better, and we can do so knowing that morning will come.