I've been avoiding writing about this part of my happy/joy treatise because, quite frankly, I'm still working my way through it. And I do so hate to write about things I don't know well. I much prefer always sounding like an expert, the one who has all the answers, who has spent all of her time Thinking Great Thoughts. Much preferred over letting you know who I really am, a blind woman stumbling in the dark, a dark that scares her to death.
I grew up in a seriously strict, seriously fundamentalist, seriously fire-and-brimstone and God-loves-you-so-much-he-pretty-much-hates-you church and school. (Oh trust me, there will be LOTS on this throughout!!)I was taught God is not a fan of failure or weakness. God won't tolerate it. God will beat it right out of you any way possible. So even now--when I know this teaching to be a lie, and thoroughly anti-God, I struggle with seeming imperfect, struggling, lost. So I've been avoiding saying anything about joy. Especially because joy, for me, is intrinsically bound up with God, flowing from God. I can't write about one without writing about the other.
In truth, we are all lost, blind, struggling. It's the human condition. To quote one of my favorite songwriters, the late great Mark Heard, we are all "soot-covered urchins, running wild and unshod"...So from one urchin to another, here's what's been coming to mind about the whole joy thing, so far...
Joy is real, far more real and lasting than happiness. And a lot harder to come by and keep, too. Joy is a choice, a determination, a deliberate state of mind and heart. It has more to do with an outward focus than an inward focus, less to do with feeling than will--at least at first. The feelings seem to be a result of the willingness to be joyful. I'm starting to believe joy has much in common with words like "rejoice", "hope", "gratitude", "service" and "worship". And it has a lot to do with pain, too.
During the darkness of my past year, I first came upon an inkling of joy in a book on mourning, Michael Card's A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching Out to God in the Lost Language of Lament. In the book, Card looks at the Biblical story of Job, which is a good one to look at if you want to look at sorrow and grief.
It's the anti-happy book. Wealthy, religious, happy and healthy Job with his big family, good health, houses and herds and lands loses everything in one fell swoop to a series of calamities and natural disasters--fires, earthquakes, thieves, illness. He winds up in rags, covered in ash, covered in festering sores and prostrate with grief. His friends come and pat him on the back and say "Man, you must have really screwed up big time for God to punish you like this." (Nice friends--for the record, in situations like this, the proper response is to envelop the griever in a huge hug and cry with them. A big ol' casserole with lots of fat and cheese would not go amiss, either.) His wife comes to him and lovingly says, "Babe, curse God and die." (I can't be too hard on her, though--she had just lost all of her children. She was in a pretty black hole of despair herself.)
And Job's response to all of this?
The Bible says "he fell to the ground in worship."
Now, I'd read this before. I'd always had a problem with it, really. If I were Job, I would've taken his wife's advice and killed myself, not fallen to the ground in worship. His response seemed to me to be too Christian, too...inhuman. The spontaneous, instinctual human response to suffering is not joy, or worship. I saw him as one of those goody two-shoes who was so blinded by his fundamentalist zeal for his faith that he deliberately refused to see the reality of his situation.
But Card's take on it blindsided me, and woke me up to the possibility that Job's response was, while certainly heroic, still definitely human. He says...
"Job is the sort of man who will simply not let go of God. To him, this is what worship means. He will stubbornly cry out in the groanings of this lament, which is worship until God answers...Job had the audacity to worship God in the midst of such indescribable pain."
Worship, obviously, is different from joy, and means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But the two are tied up together for me. To me, worship is recognizing some aspect of God's goodness and meditating on that aspect, focusing on it and recognizing it for the awe-inspiring thing it is. It can be as obvious and overt as singing along with a chorus in a church, or as subtle and personal as finding a tiny piece of cobalt sea glass on the beach, its edges rounded by the great, gray ocean. It is something that leads as if by instinct to joy.
Worship as it is too often done in the Christian church has left me cold, especially in the midst of all my loss. Too often last year I was not able to sing along with some chorus or hymn because tears were choking me, running down my cheeks. When I looked around my congregation, people were smiling and lifting their hands in the air, and bringing my grief into that sanctuary felt too much like being the embarrassing, drunken, blubbering killjoy at someone's birthday party that everyone wishes would just shut up and go home.
But here in Job I found out that God never asked me to go to church and sing happy, happy songs with upbeat rhythms. Coming from me, at the place I was in, that wasn't worship because it wasn't authentic. Where I was in my life--which felt a lot like Job's at the time--worship simply meant showing up and saying, "Why?" Because by asking "why", it showed I still believed God could answer the question. It showed that I had the audacity to believe that God and all the good things that flow from God were still real, still available, despite death, despite pain, despite grief. That I believed that pain and suffering were not the end all and be all of existence, that there might be more.
The ancient Greek myth about Pandora and her box is one of my favorites. Pandora has a box that is given to her by the gods and it contains all suffering, illness, and evil. She is told never to open the box, but curiousity gets the better of her and she does open it. The sufferings and evils go flying out to infect the world forever with their darkness, but underneath them all was one miraculous discovery that remained: hope.
Joy starts there, with hope. And hope is, by necessity, a resident with the dark things of this world. Why would we need hope, if we had no suffering, no grief, no illness or evil? What purpose would it serve? What need for faith, which the Bible defines as "the substance of things hoped for", if pain was not shouting its very real existence every day?
So here is one thing I know for sure: Joy is real. I believe that to be true. God is real. I believe that to be true. And right now, as I come blinking and raw into the sunlight after a very long night of the soul, my statement of joy is as simple as this: I believe. Still.
1 comment:
This was fantastic. Thank you!
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