This week, Christians around the world light the third candle of Advent: Joy. Every morning in my house, we are greeted with joy, by our yellow lab Clara, who brings us a sock. She’ll wake us with a full-body wag of her tail, wrapping herself around our legs in a dog embrace. Every morning her expression of joy is as if she were discovering the sock for the very first time.
When he was a toddler, my son had the same kind of joy for his grandmother. On our overnight visits to her home, he would tip toe out of bed in the early hours and stand by her bedside until she woke up. I can only imagine the joy it must have brought to her too, to wake to find her grandson, wide brown eyes, waiting for her to rise.
For adults, experiencing joy can be more complicated. Distracted or weighed down by the cares and worries of life, we are often not fully present to fully experience joy. This unfortunate tendency of ours is perhaps most evident during the Christmas season. Preoccupied by the business of planning meals and shopping for presents (and in the pre-pandemic days, attending parties), we feel hurried, hectic, and distracted. Consequently, this season is often more synonymous with anxiety than joy. This is especially true of this year. However, the poet Rilke reminds us that it doesn’t have to be: “Joy is a moment, unobligated, timeless from the beginning.” We just have to slow down enough to experience it.
A book of poems by Christian Wiman entitled “Joy:100 poems” was recommended to me at a chaplain conference. The theme of this collection is self-evident and Wiman’s intention simple: to offer poems that bear witness to and meditate on this ever-present, yet vexingly elusive phenomenon.
Given the losses we’ve faced this year, I offer “Summer Kitchen” from Wiman’s collection of poems, written by Donald Hall about his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, as a reminder to experience the joy and “miracle” of being present.
Summer Kitchen
In June’s high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.
I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.
“It’s ready now. Come on,”she said
“You light the candle.”
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.
We don’t have to create joy; we just have to experience it. May our hearts be open to the joy that God places in our lives each day.
--The Rev. Katie Solter
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