Today’s #AdventWord is “joy” because this coming Sunday’s traditionally called “Gaudete Sunday,” from the Latin word for “rejoice.”
Gaudete, gaudete!
Christus est natus
Ex Maria virgine,
gaudete!
This got me thinking about the ambiguities of celebration in the midst of suffering, and how even Bethlehem couldn’t bring itself to celebrate Christmas last year, out of respect for Gaza. Even my mother wondered if I’d find decorations hurtful coming home after five Christmases away; I said no. In fact, I was looking forward to seeing them again.
I found a poem called ‘A Brief for the Defense’ by Jack Gilbert while thinking about joy this morning. This is how it begins:
“Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.”
Sound familiar? The poem then immediately insists: “But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.”
Could this really be?
Damascus is teaching us a Christmas story right now; like Christ, joy is born in a broken world. Joy must be salvaged from the rubble. The poet continues:
“If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”
If we do not risk joy in the very belly of fear and pain, we dishonor our dead and missing. We dishonor resistance. This is our duty: “We must admit there will be music despite everything.”
There’s an unfortunate habit of thought that I often see in the leftward lean of human experience; a kind of horseshoe of incredulity that ends up counter-intuitively valorizing the very thing it professes to disbelieve in. Like the atheist who hates God so much, he won’t even step foot in a church, an anti-spirituality that somehow folds into itself and becomes a new sacrality. Or the anti-imperialist who is so virulent in her opposition to militarism that she sees regimentation, competence, and far-reaching strategy everywhere, even when the only true conspiracy unfolding is the chaos of cascading events. The unbeliever becomes so devout that theirs becomes true belief.
This is not unlike the kind of magical thinking that overtook church reformers who because so iconoclastic that they started bestowing demonic powers to sacred objects in ways that would make any actual Catholic cringe. Satan was to be opposed at all costs, even if this meant unintentionally giving him more power than God.
Which makes this line from Gilbert’s poem even more potent: “To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”
Unde lux est orta
Salūs invenitur.
Ergo nostra contio
Psallat iam in lustro.