Dear Friends,
Can you feel it? Day by day, we are moving towards Joy.
Growing up, I remember the themes of Hope, Love, Joy, and Peace. Our church’s Advent wreath hung from the high, Viking ship-inspired ceiling, which meant it often took a teen or adult to reach it when the time came to light the candles. And each year, as one of the small cohort of “early church” attendees, my mother and I were often elected to read one of the blessings inspired by the week’s theme and then light the candle together.
Text, that’s something I can remember. But images, well, let’s just say, as I sat and thought about all those years I had to text my mother to ask if there had been a pink candle on that wreath or if they had all been purple. I just couldn’t remember at all.
Yes, she told me. One pink candle and three purple ones. And the pink one (rose, I know) stands for Joy – but what does Joy feel like?
Where Great Happiness & Great Sadness Meet
As a teenager, I worked with a mental health professional who used to ask me the same question regularly. Pausing in the still air of my perpetually dismal mood, he would ask, “But do you experience joy?” It was the most absurd question I could imagine at the time. No, I did not experience joy. Do people actually experience joy? I wasn’t sure I believed it.
Joy, the way we talk about it in popular culture, is so unsullied, so simple and bubbly it can be hard to believe. It is, at least to me, saccharine. But Godly Play offers us a different approach to Joy.
When we talk about Joy in Godly Play, we sometimes encounter a unique equation: that joy is where great happiness and great sadness meet. We experience joy at Easter, for example, when we face the sadness of Jesus’ death on the cross with the extraordinary happiness and mystery of his resurrection. And at Advent, when we come to the third Sunday, we dip out of a season of serious preparation and contemplation, of readying ourselves for the King who is coming, in order to experience just a bit of the celebration that is to come. The two blend and emerge, marked by the rose-colored candle on Gaudete Sunday. It is the joy of which the Mother Mary sings upon learning from the angel Gabriel that she has been chosen to be the mother of God. “My soul magnifies the Lord…”
Making Joy Feel Real
When I was still living a life that included no notion of Joy, and even now, in my much happier life, it seems clear to me that the thing that makes Joy feel real is the way it is tempered by sorrow, by sadness and mystery and the undeniable complexity of our lives. We experience things in spectrums and dichotomies. As an autistic person who can struggle to know what I’m feeling, sometimes what I’m *not* feeling is really the starting point.
When I look at this emotion wheel, which is a bit different from the standard one, it’s surprising to find Joy as one of the core emotions, one that can be split into shades of connectedness, freedom, love, safety, silliness, and other ways of being. I am perplexed, and then I think of children and their joys. and I begin to see and understand what this arrangement means. And I think about Mary.
When Mary was chosen to be the Mother of God and sang out in Joy, what made up that feeling?
Did she feel seen by God, who chose to honor her in this way?
Did she feel connected because she was part of this bigger story?
Did she feel a special intimacy, both with God and with the infant in her womb?
And, importantly, amidst all of these shades of being, we can remember that before we hear of Mary’s Joy, we hear of her Fear. Gabriel tells her she needn’t be afraid, but still – that doesn’t mean she isn’t still experiencing that Fear – the worry and vulnerability and overwhelm of this moment. Joy does not stand alone.
Be Filled. Fill Others.
I was delighted when my mother confirmed my childhood church did indeed light a pink candle during the third week of Advent, even if that same church never would have spoken of Mary. Instead, we spoke only of Joy, which leads me here -
In the Magnificat, which shares commonalities with a number of other psalms and songs, one of the things Mary praises God for is filling the hungry with good things. It’s a passage that is reminiscent of that in Psalm 23 - “You have set a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” God, whose very nature is love, pours our God’s love upon us and fills us with it. What could be better than that?
This week, I have an art project idea for you. All you need is some pink paper, a large blank circle, and some colored pencils, crayons, or markers, plus some contact paper if you’d like. I want you to recall the place at the table God has set for you and the good things given to you, the ones that connect you to that Magnificent Joy. With words or pictures, fill your place at the table with what lifts you up in body and mind and soul. If you want to mark your actually place at a table with it, then you’ll want the contact paper or another way to laminate it, but it’s also more than enough to recall how you have been filled with good things.
They say you can’t pour from an empty cup. It’s hard to feed others, to fill them with joy, when you don’t feel full with the same good things you want to share.
The Weekly Round-Up
I’ll leave you here for now, but a few things first.
I’m over at Grow Christians talking about the Feast of St. Nicholas today. This post features some really deep cuts from early 90s media, in addition to more conventional St. Nicholas lore.
Have you pre-ordered Daneen Akers’ new book Dear Mama God? via Kickstarter? Daneen has written before about praying to Mama God with her kids, but the scholarly thought on feminine God language that she’s turned to in working on this book is also remarkable.
Just a quick reminder that we’re, uh, a month out from Epiphany today. Whether you’re planning some variety of Epiphany pageant or celebration, or you just need to remember to buy chalk for the door blessings, now’s probably a good time to start thinking about those things.
With Joy on the Journey,
Bird