By Andrea Lingle

The title of this theme is Sacred Disappointment. It is an idea that has been rising in me for a while and has roots in several theological pots, but it has mainly been fermenting out of the frustration I have with my country’s insistence that a good life is a happy life. In the formational sentences the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson wrote this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Jefferson, Declaration of Independence of the United States of America

These words are familiar, venerated, and, in practice, a burden. Equality, Life, and Liberty are great, if, unattained, but the pursuit of happiness is rough. We think we are supposed to be happy, and, when we are not, we fear that there must be something wrong.

I want chocolate in my health food.
I want my entertainment to be available when I want it.
I want my dress pants to be stretchy.

These are not bad things, but they are extras, and extras are not the goal. Happiness is an emotion not a worthy end of pursuit. It is fleeting, fickle, and insatiable. The pursuit of happiness is used as an engine to power an economy built on the backs of people desperately seeking an emotional response that lasts minutes at most.

Am I happy when I find myself giggling at kittens on the internet? Am I happy when I find twenty dollars in my pocket? Am I happy when Paul Simon is singing Graceland?

Yes.

And those things are great.

But a good life is meant for depth. Happiness isn’t great at depth. I am not quite saying that the good life should be spent in pursuit of disappointment, but I am saying that we need to resist the urge to discard our disappointment. Life is not a string of Settings, Conflicts, Climaxes, and Resolutions all satisfyingly packaged with happy endings. Life is just life. Just a series of events, most of which are shockingly mundane.

And this is disappointing.

Which, of course, reminds me of my compost pile. I am a very lazy composter. I don’t really monitor or turn my pile. I basically just toss all the food that gets a little sideways (except meat…relax…) in and forget about it. Every little while, I move the rather dilapidated bin to a new spot. Over and over for years.

One day, thinking to move some of this compost to a planting area, I pushed my shovel into the bottom of the collected scraps, past the weird grapes and the avocados that went from rocks to zombie in the space of fifteen minutes, past the pb&j crust that was left on a late for the afternoon, past the coffee grounds, basically to the center of the earth. The shovel met no resistance. No dirt packed from 100 years of hard use. No clay devoid of any nutritive value. No, nothing. Just glorious, soft soil. Sacred Disappointment invites us to imagine disappointment, not as a silver lining, not as some mysterious plan, but as a part of life, and, perhaps, like the earth, it is among the disappointing table scraps and moldy strawberries that the richness of life is replenished.