Lamentations 5:15 Meaning The Joy of Our Heart Has Ceased

Somanassa: Gladness of mind Gladness of mind is a weather condition, arriving and departing on its own schedule, with grief of mind, domanassa, as the front that follows it in. The heart that used to lift at the sound of a tambourine has gone quiet, and nobody in the ruined city chose that. Gladness came in with the harvests and the weddings and left along the same road, which is a hard thing to say plainly and an honest one.

Vipariṇāma: Turning into something else Every pleasant thing carries this turn folded inside it from the start. The same circle of clasped hands becomes the circle of mourners, the same tunes retuned into dirges, one courtyard serving both occasions. Sweetness stings on its way out, and the better the feast was, the emptier the table looks afterward, so the memory of the dancing is part of the wound.

Aṭṭha loka-dhammā: The eight worldly conditions Gain and loss, honor and disgrace, praise and blame, pleasure and pain: the world runs on these eight, and each arrives with its opposite attached. Dance and mourning are two sides of one coin, so whoever kept the festivals in the streets had already taken on the sackcloth. Seeing the pair as a pair takes some of the ambush out of the second face when it comes up.

Parideva: Lamentation Lamentation is grief said out loud, and it holds its own named place in the chain of sorrow. Voices in the ashes crying the loss are doing what grief does when it gets spoken, and there is no failure in it. Putting the thing in flat words, the joy ceased, the dance turned, gives a mourner a first handhold.

Dukkha ariyasacca: The noble truth of suffering The first of the four truths asks to be looked at straight and known all the way through. Survivors in a burnt city stating exactly what happened, the heart's joy gone, the dance turned to mourning, are doing that job with no softening in the account. Standing in the middle of a loss and describing it accurately is the ground the rest of the path gets laid on.