Dec 19 | Joy is messy (Letters from the Coast)

It took me a long time to think about something to write for the third week of Advent, which focusses on joy. Many Christians who mark the liturgical year celebrate the third Sunday as “Gaudete Sunday,” and note it on the Advent wreath with a pink candle.

At the risk of sounding rather melodramatic, I had a hard time remembering a moment of joy within the last few years.

It’s not that I’ve been dragging an Eeyore tuckus about the place! It’s more that I’ve been walking through a bit of a plateau, emotionally – a pleasant and green place after crawling out of some very deep ravines. We all need times like this. They ready us for greater heights and depths.

And indeed, I have had times where my heart has swelled with love in the last couple of years. After leaving a large and wealthy parish that had trouble imagining any place for me other than children and youth ministry, the little round parish where I serve today, made up mostly of folks on disability and middle-income workers who are thrilled to take risks, has been a garden where the seeds of my ministry have truly been allowed to grow – even take up space! I have found a home there I never could have imagined.

But that’s not quite the same as joy.

Like hope, joy has teeth. Joy cannot exist outside of a context that allows for despair. There’s happiness, contentment, delight – but none of those are joy. Joy is the messiest of the happy emotions, the one that brings tears to your eyes.

That has been elusive for a long time.

And then, I did find it, just recently.

Some folks know that I have trouble with my birthday, similarly to how other folks in grief have trouble around the holiday season. My birthday was one of the only times a year I got to really be with my Dad one-on-one. He would drive into town and take me to lunch, usually to a Chinese food place, and we’d talk. After he got settled in Brackendale, and later Squamish, he opened up a lot more about his life. He shared songs and told me all about the band he had started, and the friends he had made. Squamish made him a new man.

The first birthday without him was my thirtieth. I had a ton of weird baggage around that birthday anyway.To face it without him, especially without the special day I had tried to plan with him only a few months before he died, made me want to spend the day under the bed. And man, I don’t even have an under the bed: it’s just a boxspring on the floor.

It’s been five years, and it’s a little easier each time, but it’s still hard. When I meet new people, I now often don’t even tell them when my birthday is. I would probably be quite happy never to celebrate it again.

So imagine my surprise when, entering the Sufi semahane prayer space the Saturday after my birthday, I was caught up in the arms of Seemi, my dear dervish friend, who knew none of these secrets and therefore spun with me right in the centre of the room under the wee skylight, singing, “Happy birthday to you!”

Now in a sense, this was nothing out of the ordinary. Nearly every time I am in Seemi’s presence I feel joy wafting off of her like the scent of fresh-baked bread. Her smile is mirth and stardust.

My surprise was not that Seemi should do something so celebratory, but that I should suddenly find myself in the arms of an emanation of God – a mother, beautiful, brown, and Muslim – who took such deep delight in having me as a friend that it overspilled into my waking world.

Several days before, I woke up at 3am, went into the other room, and wept soundlessly, unable to comprehend the stony solid fact that all things pass away, and I would too, and it would be alone.

Now, here in the arms of this dervish who was fully The Friend for me, my deep gravity (literal grave-ity) was dismissed as easily as a solitary raincloud in an endless expanse of blue.

“What have you to fear?” cried The Friend, and howled with laughter. “You think the grave will swallow me? I’ve made a sand palace of the grave! Come and play with me and we shall knock it down!”

My helpless laughter became tears, of course.

Both Friend and friend held me.

In these dark days as we continue to wait for the light that is coming into the world, perhaps God’s beloved child Mary had a similar experience in the arms of Elizabeth, both fearful and yet shaking with laughter at the absurdity of fear in the face of the One who calls us, transforms us, and sends us out into the world to set it ablaze.

May joy find you, and may you have the patience to ride her waves.

She will come, even to the wilderness.