Sunday, December 15, 2024, 5:37 a.m.

Today is the third Sunday of Advent — joy. I am thinking about all who suffer, who find it so unattainable — to live it, breathe it, and enjoy it. In midwinter’s bleak season, joy is often offensive. How impossible it seems (especially when one is fighting to stay above the murky and chaotic deep).

Joy demands from us. Demands that we unclench our fists, release our grip on the loss we feel so coupled to, indebted to. Joy’s light gives us something else to focus on, something else to pay attention to. In grief, we war against it because to give our attention to something else feels like we are negating or minimizing our losses or sufferings, betraying ourselves and our stories.

What if, perhaps, this is the very twisty whisper the serpent would have us pay too close attention to? It checks out.

We fall prey to an “either/or” when “both/and” invites us to rightly (appropriately) carry the grief while also understanding that carrying it does not keep us imprisoned. The door is open. We can move into joy and return to our lament, moving in and out, stretching and staying in either grief or joy in ways that allow us to hold space for both. Neither sinking in nor escaping — but being, experiencing the fullness of our capacities, however limited.

Joy often returns us to Advent’s first Sunday — hope. For the fearful and fretting heart, panic sucks the air from our lungs at the slightest plausibility. And in this resistance, invitation. Invitation to stretch into discomfort (for haven’t we all found comfort in our sorrows themselves?) and invitation to tolerate possibility, invitation to labor toward hope, peace, joy, and love.

The light of joy disrupts the dark. Hints and glimpses of it are everywhere, available to us in the most dismal places. But as with so many aspects of grief, to seek joy and see it, we must take a deep breath and let our losses and deaths ascend1, even if only for a moment.