Joy in January! Who Knew?

How Undeserved Joy Leads to Unspeakable Gratitude

With the obvious caveat that this day is not over and that no one knows what will come till it does come, I can say that this has likely been the most joy-filled January I can recall for many and many a year. It has also, paradoxically, been a January to try the souls of many people, my own not least. Given the state of things in the world, which is exceptionally bleak, with our vaunted shining city on a hill to the south moving further and further toward wrath and perhaps even ruin with each passing day, why is it that I have felt joy, and perhaps more importantly, is there a way for me to pass it on, as it were?

First, I will say that the joy I have felt has not been grounded in naive ignorance of the world around me. I, like many of us, do keep up with the news on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. There are also times when I succumb to rage and sadness. But the joy still remains as something unassailable, because it isn’t actually mine. I have done nothing really to create it. It’s true that I have been exercising more and experimenting in the kitchen to broaden my cooking skills, that sort of thing, but the joy seems to just be there as long as I can calm myself down enough to find it.

I don’t know if this is what Christ means when, in John’s Gospel, He mentions joy. If it is, what right have I, a person who prays inconsistently at best, to have it? To see it or know it? Feeling is the wrong word I think for what it is. Yet, it’s there. It’s there when I remember to run to it, and it’s sometimes even there when I forget to remember.

As ever, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve said this before. I’m waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me, precisely because I have absolutely no business being this way. But then that’s the beauty of it. I do have no business having such joy, and yet it is given to me.

In Orthodox prayer, we often lament our unworthiness and our unprofitableness. We take as our examples humble people such as the tax-collector Zacchaeus. He was short, so he climbed into a sycamore tree to see Jesus better over the crowd. Everyone was scandalized that Jesus would speak with this tax-collector, who was a pawn of the Roman state and would have been, by reputation at least, an unscrupulous extortioner of his fellow Jews. But the story goes that he merely saw Jesus and something happened. Something changed his outlook. He didn’t stop being a tax-collector, but he said he would stop profiting by it and that he would give to the poor. And Christ said that salvation was coming to his house, because Zacchaeus had offered Him hospitality.

Zacchaeus didn’t have to leave his occupation. He just had to orient it correctly. He had to leave behind what was expected by his—let us say—corporate culture in favour of something more beneficial to his fellow-humans. His joy was such that he needed to climb up into the tree to see Jesus. He wasn’t hiding in fear, but approached Jesus in the boldness of love.

I only realize now how long I have spent running in fear, hiding from what my faith can offer me because I didn’t want to be changed. I didn’t want to become joyless and judgy, hard and unyielding. I didn’t want to become some meek woman who would never say boo to a goose, but even despite Paul’s admonition for women to keep silence in the churches,I cannot keep silent. There is true joy! It does exist in the darkest of places! If it didn’t, I would likely have been killed, in spirit if not in body, a thousand times over by now.

I know that nothing I say here can do anything for anyone. I know that my words are just words, and rather self-centred words at that. But I also know that they are true.. I wish I could understand it or explain it. I wish I knew why it is there, but I know that it is there. I don’t believe it. I don’t think it. I don’t even feel it as such, though that is a part of it. I know it in my bones, my dry bones which are slowly being covered in sinews and flesh.

Too long have I walked a wavering line. Too long have I tried to be too many things at once—christian, but not too Christian, worldly but not too worldly, Sara but not too Sara. There is a Sara I still don’t know, a Sara whose true name is known only to God. But I have to find her, though she be buried under a mountain of misguided deeds and words, though she must be sifted carefully from all that is still dust within me. I have to find out who she is with Christ’s light as my looking-glass.

Almost twenty years ago He found me. Almost twenty years ago that other me was born, or at least awakened. Then, that joy which I know is true was turned little by little to darkness and doubt, to fear of scaring people away or of not being loved because I wasn’t good enough. That same old demon which had made me leave what passed for my faith some years before had come back with a vengeance. Surely I wasn’t a meek enough woman for God to love me. Surely I wasn’t a mother, so what good was I? I scored a point or two by becoming a wife, but again, no kids, so what was I doing here? I wanted to create, but that couldn’t be the lot of a good Christian woman unless maybe she wrote hymns or painted icons or something, now could it? Marriage, working (maybe,) and motherhood. That’s what a good Christian woman was supposed to do, unless of course she was a nun. Could I even create? What if I committed some sort of heresy? The Lord knew that there were enough of those floating around in church, so best to be silent.

It is likely better to be silent much of the time, to receive rather than to transmit, to guard your heart and your senses. But I sat there not praying, then being depressed about not praying, then not praying because I was depressed about not praying. The same went for everything else in my life for a number of years. This joy was not with me, or rather, I was not in it. I let myself be shut out from it. I let myself think that because I had no right to it, which again is strictly true, I was not allowed to have it. I thought I was being humble, or well, I didn’t think about it, but I thought that love bears all things and believes all things, so I kept my head down. I was silent, and little by little, my soul was being consumed in its own juices.

Almost twenty years ago He found me. It is only now that I have remembered how to find Him. I have to let the sun shine onto my tear-stained face, even if it burns me, even if it shows me how far I have still to go. Whatever happens, there will be joy if I can but remember it, if I can just stand back a little and let myself be filled with it, at least from time to time.

There’s usually no need to look for a cross to take up. It will present itself. Life is filled with hard things, with pain and suffering. The world is dark, but the night is far-spent. The day is at hand. There has to be a way to live into that new day, to be present here, jumping down into the holes into which others have fallen, being with them and helping them escape if possible, while also not surrendering to the night, not despairing of the coming dawn, for it will come. It can come. Indeed, it is always coming.

This doesn’t make much sense, but it is true, at least in my experience. Your milage may vary and likely will. I also promise you that I am not crazy and do not intend to do anything too weird. I just intend to be whomever it is that I am supposed to be and to stop feeling ashamed of myself. It is true that my wedding garment is still being dry-cleaned, or—what is more likely—still being made, but God willing, I will have it when it is required. “And so abide these three: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.” I am sometimes sad, but hope to go forward in joy. It’s one thing to say that I know that I am nothing in the grand scheme of things and therefore I cannot be loved (a thought I have had many times in my life and with which I think many of us struggle), but it is quite another to say that I know that I am nothing and I glory in my nothingness, precisely because the very unnecessariness of me is something to God and to my family and friends. The world would keep on spinning if I wasn’t here, but I’ve been given the world as a gift, my life as a gift. I need to use that gift, to live with intention! May God help, and joy be with you all!