One of the people I most admire–a writing mentor about the age of my parents–recently lost her strong young-man son. My heart goes out to her. Life is so full of surprises. Not all of them are bad. But some of them are very hard indeed.
“Hold your life with an open hand,” a beautiful woman told me long ago. For a long time I kept the picture she gave me–a drawing of hands held open to God–on my bedside table. Then I gave it to someone I thought it might help.
Open hands invite joy.
I think this is true even in sorrow. Letting go–or maybe I mean experiencing the pangs fully instead of cramping and fighting–allows healing. “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now,” the apostle Paul writes in Romans 8:22 (ESV). “And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.”
Recently I read Madeleine L’Engle’s time quintet. My favorite of her themes is joy: “that joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse” (from A Swiftly Tilting Planet).
I have thought quite a bit about joy since reading that book. My middle name is Joy, and when I was young, God gave me a special verse: “Thou wilt shew me the path of life; in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Psalm 16:11 KJV
Since then, I feel He has often given me a special gift of joy. But not always. Sometimes the world grinds on, and I am miserable. When I look to the universe, joy returns. By this I do not mean worshiping the universe–I mean pausing and being and opening myself to the God that breathes in it. L’Engle talks about listening to the stars sing; maybe that is what I mean.
Last week, listening to “No Dark Sky”, the first episode in the Wonderology podcast produced by Christianity Today, I thought of L’Engle again. Scott Acton, a scientist who helped build the most sophisticated telescope in existence, talks about a moment when he hears the stars singing. His moment of epiphany happened in the midst of the profound joy and awe he felt when the telescope revealed from space billions of galaxies we didn’t know were out there. “These images have profoundly changed the way I see the universe,” he said later. “We are surrounded by a symphony of creation; there are galaxies everywhere!”
Speaking of joy and abundance: my children. I had a birthday in October, and they helped me (generously) apply sprinkles to apple cupcakes.
Here’s me when I was little, on the right in the photo:
Do you think Annalise looks like me?
Or like Ivan, pictured below with a birthday cake?
How about Teddy? I think he looks a lot like his daddy.
I think Teddy also looks like my dad–his namesake–as pictured in the childhood photo below.
Pausing to notice the joy that holds the universe together,
Luci
John Coblentz said in a class on grief that I took from him, something like this: “sorrow carves a hole in our heart so we can hold more joy.” I have found this to be true. Losing a lot of people close to us has heightened my awareness of how fleeting time is and somehow makes me so much more aware of the beauty in each day.
That is really beautiful.