On The Wild Things of God (I love that name!) today there is a about sadness. He describes the feeling of needing to fight sadness, to snap out of it. I know I've felt like that, but, it is interesting to ponder whether sadness is a necessary part of the spiritual path.
On the mundane level, sadness is definitely something to be avoided, but it seems very likely that the spiritual journey requires us to go deeper into sadness, to embrace it and not to resist. Every experience we are given has meaning. It is up to us to find it. By feeling every second of sadness with intensity, we cleanse it.
The judgment that sadness is wrong just because it doesn’t feel good is prevalent in our society. We are taught that we must understand the causes of sadness, and rid ourselves of it like a disease. Understanding sadness actually gets in the way of releasing it. It is more important to feel it than to understand it. Reason is irrelevant. We must trust that if God brings us sadness it is for a Divine purpose. Maybe we are processing something in our own past which is blocking our closeness to God or maybe we are bearing the burdens of a cultural sadness. By delving into our own feelings, we are helping humanity to discharge it. We are all intimately connected.
Our bodies are like river beds. We are the channel through which the Divine flows into the material world. It is our duty not to block the river. Denying our sadness, running from it, leaves the sadness to settle and damn river. So, in the conclusion (from someone who know nothing at all!), as uncomfortable as it is, sadness is necessary to the spiritual path.