Use ‘Joyance’ in a Sentence

This was a fun and hilarious thread on twitter, only partially ruined midway by a scolder who wanted everyone to stop complaining. It is of pastors enumerating, with great good humor, the strangest criticisms they’ve ever received. It’s full of wonderful horrors like, ‘you care too much for special needs children,’ ‘I hate your tie,’ and ‘you’re terrible with people.’ Too many, as you scroll along, are ‘you preach the Bible too much,’ which should be taken as a complement of course, but in the post Sunday collapse still always stings.

Anyway, if you’re guilty of saying ridiculous things to your pastor, I don’t want to make you feel bad. It’s almost Christmas and we’re all guilty of having the wrong expectations at one moment or another. Yea, even I occasionally wander into church with the wrong hopes, not for the pastor, but for God. I usually know with my head why I’m there, but the rest of me is pretty slow to catch up.

Which is indeed the entire point of these closing days of Advent. I was trying to articulate for myself why it is that, moments that are supposed to be truly and purely, at least in the world’s eyes, about pleasure, about joy—I’m talking about things like having a birthday, or giving birth to a baby, or moving into a new house, or any usually happy event—are often eclipsed by stress, by anxiety, by dread.

‘I think,’ I said, waving my arms wildly at the end of church last week, struggling into my coat and trying to regather all my children who had given up on the idea of ever going home on account of me saying, over and over, ‘yes let’s go, I just need to get something from my classroom,’, ‘I think,’ I said, ‘it’s just that it’s all at once.’ I love all of the individual components, the pageant, the dinner, the tree, the sparkle. But when you join them altogether into one grand Feast it is like a firehose of stimulation and wonder, and my emotionally narrow frame just can’t take it. Or rather, it can but then I shudder over the recovery on the other side.

And then on Tuesday of this week I remembered that last year I popped off to Kenya suddenly at the end of October to help my dad from wheel chair to wheel chair through various airports, wondering what on earth was wrong and why he couldn’t stand and if he would ever be well again. Christmas Day 2017 turned out to be the moment that, for the first time in months and months, something switched and he began to feel better. By the end of Lent he was walking around the block. Somehow, I think my whole body is poised for crisis, out of habit, even though this year everyone is well. The darker parts of me are expecting the worst.

This is what is so miraculous about the incarnation, and so compassionate of Jesus. Because we, here in the 21st century, aren’t so different from all those people wandering around in the 1st. Except that we are not as well educated, and can’t remember why we should go to church or what is supposed to happen when we get there. That it isn’t about whether the pastor is shaven or unshaven, whether he knows how to play the guitar or not. Indeed, it is not about the pastor. And it isn’t about the congregation much either. It’s about the catastrophe of humanity needing to face God, of having to admit the vast and terrible separation that exists between us and him, and just not being able to do it. Not being able laugh when it is time to laugh, or dance when it is time to dance, or cry when it is time to cry, or obey when it is time to obey. Our deep and total turn inward blocks out the light, utterly. There is no hope.

And so God, who didn’t have to, came to turn us back round, to open the narrow way for the light to finally cast a shadow of hope over humanity’s ruined estate. He didn’t come in the way we wanted or expected because we didn’t even know why we needed him. And we still don’t.

And so the preacher has to stagger into the pulpit over and over, saying the same thing, retracing the steps of Jesus again and again. No matter what he is wearing, or how the poor congregation is feeling, they both are, by the grace of the God who himself came to do what we could not do, constrained to walk in the way that they should. It is halting and painful. Many wander away for some other solution that seems to make more sense. But as the years expire from that single moment when God overturned and restored the fortunes of his people, more and more are added to the number of those who are taught to repent first, and then to rejoice.

The word of the day is joyance, coined by Edmund Spenser in the Faerie Queene. It’s difficult to use, but we should all try anyway.