Weaving Joy

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

The spindle of Advent is running thin. Just three weeks ago, it was wound to the edge with holiday plans, gift ideas, social anxieties, and more to-dos than can reasonably be done. Of the threads you have pulled and woven into the tapestry that is this year’s preparation for the coming Christ, how many have been measured against someone else’s threads? How many are frayed? How many of them bear the sheen of joy? When you stand back, what do you see emerging from the warp and weft of your days? From my vantage point, your tapestry is gorgeous.

During the holiday months, “Joy” is emblazoned across mugs, billboards, and gift bags. It is spelled out in glitter script across season of Advent. However, joy is, in my experience, poorly represented by glitter. It is mysterious, abiding, and undemanding. Joy, like love (most assuredly not by coincidence), resides nearby regardless of the context or circumstance. Joy does not require anything from you, it only asks that you settle into its embrace. It cannot be manufactured only cultivated. Joy is not happiness. Joy lives in your guts. Joy knows how to wear mourning. Joy does not desert the sick room. Joy is saddle-leather tough.

What is Joy? Nothing less than being loved.

Joy is the result of daring to believe that the Creator did so in love. Of you. Joy is resting in your inability to increase the love that Spirit already has for you and had for you before you got up and started in on your list. Joy is noticing that you already belong.

Hope, Peace, and Joy are the markers of Advent, and it is easy in twinkle-light December to forget their radical nature. Throughout the millennia that Advent has been practiced, these words have been adopted, not because they are pretty, but because they are the necessary foundation that spiritual communities must commit to to avoid the pitfalls of despair, avarice, and greed. Hope, peace, and joy are not Christmas decorations, they are fundamental. They live beneath the level of feelings creating space in a world devoted to scarcity.

If Joy is fundamental yet mysterious, how are we to weave our lives with it? How can you gather moonlight? By stopping under the night sky, immune to the demand of time, and letting it soak into your soul. How do you remember the shape of frost covered grass? By pausing and admiring what no one strove to create. How do you preserve the glory of a sunset? By sitting with it until the rolling of the planet releases you from the world of light. Stopping, pausing, sitting. These are the actions of cultivating Joy.

The threads of joy that are woven into our lives are received. They are discovered. They are grace.