SO THAT YOUR JOY MIGHT BE COMPLETE
If there’s one overarching sign of our cultural spiritual bankruptcy, it has to be the complete lack of joy.
Joy, in fact, is now suspect. It indicates that you have in your head in the sand, that’s you’re not sufficiently aware; that you don’t see the world as a place of darkness, evil, and the good guys (you and your political allies) vs the bad guys (everyone else).
In a recent NYT op-ed, for example, Margaret Renkl describes reading Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” decades after its publication. She’d adored it the first time, but–
“The second time around, “Tinker Creek” raised some of the same issues for me. Reading it as a 62-year-old, it turns out, is entirely different from reading it as a language-besotted college student just learning that writing like Annie Dillard’s could exist in living time, as indelible as any line by Shakespeare or Keats or Dickinson.”
“The features of the book that make me cast a sideways glance today — the specific circumstances of privilege, or just the good luck, that make it possible for a young woman to feel confident wandering alone in even a suburb-skirting woodland, for instance — ought to have made me cast a sideways glance in 1980, too, though they did not. I was also a young woman who knew so little of the human world that I still felt safe walking alone in the wild one.”
Give me a pre-paid break. So Annie Dillard was supposed to preface her 1980 book with an apology for being white, a renunciation of her “privilege,” and a caveat that walking in a suburb-skirting woodland was a perilous undertaking for any young woman who didn’t happen to be young and blond? And in 1980 we, the readers, were suppposed to have noticed all that, begrudged her safety, and besmirched the book?
What world is this where we spend our time tearing down everything that is good and smearing every work of art with this bizarrely paranoid, revisionist overlay?
When did it become perilous (or when did we begin to perceive it as perilous) to walk in a suburb-skirting woodland, or an urban alley, or a trail through the desert anyway?
When did we go from willingly assuming a certain amount of risk as our joy-infused birthright–and then celebrating the walk, describing the walk, sharing the discoveries we made on the walk–to this outlandish claustrophobia?
What is Renkl’s point even? That only white people can take a walk without fear of danger? That “the human world” is such in such an apocalyptic state that no-one can? All I know is that the cultural elite can hardly read a freaking book any more without pursing their lips, applying the lens of identity politics, and decades or even centuries after the fact declaring the work (inevitably) unenlightened, racist and -phobic something or other.
I started to re-read “Tinker Creek” a year or so ago and found it kind of overblown (as did Renkl)–but to judge a piece on its merits vs. through an ideology are two very different things…
Lack of joy requires no work, no sacrifice, no creativity, no real thought. It’s like a virus that seems to infect through the news, social media, the general zeitgeist in which almost imperceptibly people becomes the enemy, the adversary, the other…
I am hardly a sunny type by nature but I have not (yet) become too paranoid to take a simple walk, nor so swayed by popular prejudice that I can’t enjoy a book of the time and place it was written, nor so suffused with guilt that I have to go about apologizing for existing. The Lord knows I have plenty else to apologize for, but my existence, again, I celebrate–in fear and trembling!
It’s a huge gift that the two places where I spend much of my time–church and recovery circles–are suffused with the Resurrection.
Daily I see light shining in the midst of darkness, broken lives beginning to be made whole, humor defeating despair, random acts of kindness, the fruit of humble, contrite hearts (usually with lots of swearing), prayer in action. We leave politics, ideology and outside issues at the door and deal, in the roughest, most seemingly ordinary, humdrum ways with our spirits, our consciences, our hearts and our souls.
We try to get rigorously honest, we make direct amends to the people we’ve harmed, we develop a relationship with a Power greater than ourselves.
And it’s all so interesting and ever-unfolding and absorbing that I’m often brought up short by the viewpoint of much of the rest of the world.
Then again, of course, I’m utterly blind to my own biases.
“What do you want from me?” Christ asked.
Help me to see.
Not through rose-colored glasses: Christ came to bring a sword.
But clearly. With eyes guided by love.
Because he also came so our joy might be complete (John 15:11).
