I Will Not Build a Shrine to Sorrow

On the Glorification of Suffering, the Machinery of Fear, and the Reclamation of Joy

She has known sorrow, but she will not build it a throne.

I do not often write from a place of anger. Not because anger does not visit me, but because I prefer to let it sit awhile. I want to know what has summoned it, what it is asking me to see, and whether its heat can be made useful before I allow it onto the page.

I also try to speak with care, mindful that where one person’s experience ends, another’s existence begins. I know sorrow has private histories and that another person’s grief may occupy ground I cannot see. But there are moments when care must not become silence, and composure must not become complicity.

This is one of those moments.

Lately, I have felt a growing weariness. Not with sorrow itself, but with how readily we preserve it, polish it, and build our identities around it.

Sorrow is human. It arrives without invitation, removes its shoes at the door, and often refuses to leave when asked. Grief, loss, disappointment, loneliness. These are not moral failures. They belong to the bewildering contract of being alive.

What unsettles me is how easily sorrow is crowned.

Suffering is lifted into proof of goodness, happiness is met with suspicion, and pain is treated as more truthful than pleasure, as though melancholy alone grants depth and anyone not presently wounded has failed to understand the seriousness of existence.

Why is pain so often spoken of as though it were the only honest language?

Why are fear, guilt, punishment, sacrifice, and endless consequence passed down so unquestioningly, as though the Divine shaped this vast, intricate world merely to test our endurance?

And why, after centuries of being frightened, shamed, divided, and promised redemption by those who seem remarkably invested in guarding its gates, do we still hesitate to ask who benefits from all this sorrow?

What kind of moral compass is at work when suffering is not merely acknowledged, but quietly cultivated, shaped, and sustained because it serves those in power?

There is something deeply unsettling in the way control can masquerade as care. Authority cloaks itself in righteousness, fear is reframed as guidance, and dependence is mistaken for devotion.

Vulnerability is not healed, but managed. Pain is not relieved, but organised. Human fragility becomes a resource, and the systems built upon it learn to preserve the very suffering they claim to redeem.

Surely the sacred does not require a chorus of trembling intermediaries.

Yet those who appoint themselves custodians of these systems have long understood something about human beings. Fear gathers more easily than freedom.

A joyful person is difficult to contain. A person who trusts their own conscience, delights in the world, and feels no shame for being alive has little need for someone to stand between them and meaning. Such a person may still seek wisdom, prayer, community, and quiet companionship, but they are less likely to surrender their mind simply because authority has been dressed in ceremony.

Sorrow, on the other hand, can be shaped into obedience.

Convince people that they are fundamentally lacking, and they will spend their lives trying to earn their own worth. Teach them that pleasure is suspect, the body is something to distrust, questioning is dangerous, and suffering is noble, and they may eventually begin guarding these ideas themselves.

Soon, the structure sustains itself.

Those seated comfortably at the highest tables need only speak occasionally of sacrifice. The rest will carry it out.

The vestments may disappear and the ring lights come on, but the instinct survives. What was once organised from the pulpit is now also curated through screens. Sorrow gathers attention, belonging, authority, and sometimes profit. The language may sound therapeutic rather than theological, but the old temptation remains. A wound can become a congregation just as readily as a creed.

There is a sharpness in these words. I will not soften it into something decorative.

I have watched suffering be romanticised while the conditions that produce it remain untouched. I have watched helplessness performed and applauded, both in the world around me and across the glowing corridors of the internet, where sorrow gathers an audience more quickly than joy ever seems to.

One person declares themselves irreparably broken, and within moments a gathering forms, each voice offering its own wound as proof of belonging. Pain recognises pain, and there can be great tenderness in that recognition. But there is also a point where witnessing becomes dwelling, and solidarity becomes a quiet agreement not to leave.

The internet has become remarkably skilled at furnishing such rooms.

There are cushions, soft lighting, and countless voices ready to explain why stepping outside would be a kind of betrayal.

We speak often of holding space for sorrow. Perhaps we must also ask whether we know how to hold space for healing.

Can we walk with someone beyond the wound, or have we grown so accustomed to meeting in pain that recovery feels like distance?

Happiness can be strangely isolating. Not because it is shallow, but because it asks something of those who encounter it. It asks whether they can stand beside another person’s fullness without comparison, without suspicion, and without the quiet urge to diminish it.

We know what to say when someone is grieving. We have inherited scripts for loss, disappointment, and illness.

But when someone says, “I am content. Life is good. I feel free,” something unsettled enters the room.

Surely there must be a complication.

Surely such ease is naïve.

Surely something is being avoided.

We have become so devoted to uncovering hidden pain that we no longer trust that a garden may simply be a garden.

Perhaps this is because freedom carries responsibility. If sorrow becomes our identity, we are never required to discover who we might be without it. If every present choice can be traced back to a wound, then the wound becomes both explanation and shelter.

But life keeps pressing gently against the walls we build.

It appears in morning light, in an unexpected laugh, in bread rising beneath a cloth, in the hand of a child reaching for ours without hesitation, in the quiet return of appetite after grief, in music, friendship, rain, colour, and the bewildering fact that the heart, after everything, still leans toward opening.

Life is always, quietly, loosening what we have mistaken for permanence.

This does not mean we deny suffering or abandon those within it. It means we refuse to place suffering at the centre and ask everyone to orbit it.

There is a difference between honouring grief and giving it the throne.

There is a difference between compassion and living indefinitely inside a wound.

There is a difference between reverence and fear dressed in sacred language.

And there is a difference between a guide who returns us to what is sacred within and a gatekeeper who behaves as though even God must pass through his permission.

Perhaps the way forward is not to silence our anger, but to ask what it has risen to protect.

Anger can clear the air when something false has lingered too long. It opens windows. It asks the question that has been avoided. It refuses inherited shame. It guards what is still alive.

But anger must eventually choose what it serves.

Mine serves joy.

Not the fragile brightness of slogans. Not forced gratitude or the performance of light while something inside quietly dims.

I mean the steadier kind of joy that has looked directly at suffering and still refuses to call it sovereign.

The joy that does not ask permission.

The joy that remains unafraid of questions.

The joy that understands the Divine cannot be so fragile that an honest human mind threatens it.

Perhaps joy is not something we earn after enduring correctly.

Perhaps joy is the release itself.

I am no longer drawn to teachings that make people smaller, more afraid, more ashamed, or more dependent upon those delivering them. I am drawn to whatever returns a human being to courage, discernment, compassion, responsibility, and wonder.

Call it what you will.

Call it freedom.

Call it the quiet remembering that we were not born merely to endure.

Sorrow will continue to visit. I do not intend to bolt the door against it. When it arrives, I will listen. I will make tea. I will allow it to say what it came to say.

But grief may knock. It may even stay for supper.

It does not get the deed to the house.