Admittedly my favorite parts of the Bible are not the Gospels (although the narration and the details are fascinating); nor is it the Pentateuch and other Biblical narratives. It's not even the letters of Paul (although I appreciate the organization and culture behind them). No, it's not even the songs of praise in Psalms.
My favorite parts of the Bible are the lament poems. The sad, raw realities stashed in metaphor and parallelism.
Now, you may be curious (doubly so if you've read my post on Ecclesiastes) about a few things. For starters, am I naturally inclined to depressing things that lurk in the Bible?
I would answer yes. I believe church culture portrays the Bible--although they're not always wrong--as a moral handbook with encouragements for life. And while they're not completely astray--sure, parts of the Bible can at times be encouraging and helpful--is it really worth it to ignore the fact that yes, sad things exist in the Bible? There's more to the 1.5k pages than happiness and feel-good poetry.
Life doesn't go the way we want it to. Tragic events occur. We leave home and are shoved into a foreign land where we have little say in our life.
In a culture centered around happiness, in which sad things are an inconvenience and to be ignored, why can't we at least acknowledge the sadness in the Bible? Wouldn't that make the greatest happiness of all time shine brighter?
Ecclesiastes 7:3: Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.
It's a simple case of contrasting and parallelism. A book that's full of short sentences will become a headache eventually. Solely using long sentences drags on, and on, and on, and on... But utilizing both type of sentences lends them their full power.
Same with emotions. Same with joy and grief.
And in that grief there is beauty. The lament songs--in my artistic opinion--show a depth and flow that other poems in the Bible don't quite have. There is something about grief (and maybe not saying "Praise the LORD!" every other line) that is more tangible than praise; grief is harder to fake. And the joy that comes after grief is even harder to take.
Humans were created with a spectrum of emotions. Sadness is one of them. And if we are to mourn with those who mourn, yet no one mourns but ourselves, where does that leave us?
No, I still believe that the rest of the Bible has its place. Joy and hope and love and faith and grace and mercy all have their time, in the Bible and in life. To ignore happiness would be just as much a crime as brushing over the hard parts of the Bible for sake of convenience. God didn't inspire the Bible just, with no other intent, so we could 'feel good.' And the fact that the Bible has hard books and topics like Ecclesiastes and Lamentations should further show us that God doesn't brush over sadness. The God of Scripture cried and felt sadness himself, not using a pat-on-the-back solution to wipe all those troubling feelings away.
He felt them.
So why is the Bible treated like a cure-all for depression, when tastes of reality are sprinkled throughout? Happiness may be nice...
But sorrow exists too.