Deeper the Depths, Higher the Heights

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

— Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931)

Simple truths are often the profoundest. The thesis we test, here, is the deeper we go into the depths of sorrow, the higher we might go, later on, regarding the heights of joy. Somehow, with a greater capacity of experience for sorrow there is a commensurate capacity for experiencing joy—later, often much later.

It is strange to consider that within sorrow there is the eventual blessing. Our human default is to run in the midst of sorrow, to discount it and simply move on. And yet, when we resist this human default we learn the stillness within sorrow and come close to the very heart of God in the silence.

We become bigger people for having transcended our weakness through the strength of God. This weakness was the very vehicle bringing us into communion with the Lord. If not for utter calamity we would not know this peace that transcends our understanding.

Not that we celebrate calamity; no, not at all.

But calamity teaches us a thing or two about life; life is a struggle, and when we manage to accept this simple yet incomprehensible fact we surpass the limits of our weaker human spirits. God has anointed us with this strength.

But strength is not the only positive. Just as by our weakness we derive strength—by a miracle, augmented by our faith—we also, by our experience of sorrow, derive the capacity of overflowing joy.

All this takes faith, and faith never operates with any sense of full vision for what might be.

We can see very readily here that the spirituality of risk to choose for faith is the thing that builds our capacity to encapsulate joy. The more faith we can show, the more joy we can contain, and the more voluminous those sources of joy are.

Surely there is greatness abounding out of the depths of depths. Only the solemn go there. Only those with the greatest of faith remain. As if enduring without reason, seeming to not even care about ourselves, we go a long way in reconciling the eventual capacity for joy abounding.

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There is no depth that has us remaining there, and the deeper we go the higher we might come. Depths that are plumbed are synonymous with heights climbed.

The joy of all joys—to the heights of eventual and overriding bliss—in containing the majesty of spiritual happiness, is all made complete by the honest enduring sacrifice of suffering well at the depths.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.