Advent 3 // On Our Neighbor and Choosing Joy
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In my house, we have frequent conversations about our neighbor.
While my family is quite aware of the impact of the “nosy neighbor” role, we can’t help it. Our neighbor across the street has an amazing dog – in fact, that dog inspired us to choose that breed and now Winston is part of our family.
The way our home is set up, if you walk through the kitchen past the front door you have a direct line of sight to our neighbor’s house.
We watch Jack (the dog) chase cars down the fence line. He toddles through the backyard, sniffing and digging at random intervals.
During the spring and cooler summer days, our neighbor puts a chair in the shady front corner of the yard. Opposite the garden, underneath the spreading honey locusts, he sits with his back angled to the traffic of the street.
There is no agenda for this sitting. No work being done except the hard work of being with oneself in the midst of reality.
If you look closely, you can see on my neighbor’s face an easily identifiable trait – joy.
As Advent steams by, we are invited to lean into the idea of joy. The idea? The concept? What do we call joy?
The temptation is to call joy a feeling but there is a sense in which joy can’t be a feeling because there is already a feeling that closely resembles joy.
Happiness.
Are happiness and joy the same thing?
I’ve advocated in the past that they are not. Happiness is that feeling of well-being that comes from external stimuli. A good day at work, a grilled cheese and tomato soup (can I get an amen?), the sound of Debussy or Derulo or whomever gives your ears the grace they require.
Just a note, I’m not putting Debussy on the same level with Jason Derulo. There is no comparison.
Happiness feels very reactive – it is a natural affect that comes from external circumstances.
If that’s true, then happiness is fickle. It ebbs and flows like any other passing sensation. The thing that makes us happy today may hold no value tomorrow.
It goes without saying that happiness isn’t a foundation fit for building our spiritual life .
But joy, joy is different. Isn’t it?
The grit of Jesus’ birth narrative digs in most when we realize that there was very little to be happy about at that time. Poverty, a narrative silent space where the Divine was mute for 400 years, and an oppressive Empire bent towards its own preservation at all costs (which is what all empires are about, of course).
Little happiness, if any. But joy? Joy was there.
Our neighbor had a stroke this year. We noticed the flashing lights and heard the dog barking. For days we watched our other neighbor who lives immediately to our right as he walked across the street, let the dog out, and put the newspaper inside.
We wondered if the man across the street would return.
As a pastor I have grieved over my fair share of people who one day lived comfortably on their own, and the next traded a hospital gown for their best-suit-they-never-wear. Their stories closed with tears, flowers, and then the arduous process of tying up logistical loose ends. Loose ends of a human life. So strange.
Our neighbor, however, came home.
We didn’t realize it until we saw a nurse park in front of the house and go in. Home health care came twice a week.
Then we saw him again. He walked up and down our street with his cane, slowly, his right foot delaying significantly behind the left.
One day after a run I saw our neighbor and stopped to talk.
“How are you?” I asked.
Why we ask these questions of people who have suffered a great deal, I don’t know. It was the best question I had. Or it was automatic. One of the two.
“As well as can be expected,” he replied. Trying to keep walking, stay active.
We talked about the dog. Jack had grown shaggy and greasy since our neighbor’s hospitalization. It was time for a trip to the groomer.
“We actually got a puppy of the same breed as Jack,” I said.
He grinned. “Is that so?”
With his right side sloping, his independence hanging on by the finger tips, my mention of Winston brought that look back to his face.
The look you’d see when he sat in the spring-summer shade, beneath the honey locust, staring at the garden from his chair in the corner.
The look of joy.
Joy is, in my opinion, a choice.
The Christmas narrative was a moment of joy only for those who chose to see it as such. Herod found no joy in Christmas, despite the fact that the Messiah would set all things to rights. Herod knew that setting all things to rights meant removing his power, authority, and privilege.
I believe that is why we find people of privilege in positions of desperate unhappiness these days.
For whatever reason, the joy that comes in seeing all people get a seat at the table can’t overcome the happiness of keeping our own seat.
To choose joy is to learn to be okay even when things aren’t okay.
This year we lit our Advent candles, we read about “good news of great joy,” in the midst of record numbers of pandemic-related deaths. With hospitals filled to bursting and with the circle of “cases” growing closer and closer to us, we read about the choice to be okay even when things weren’t okay.
To be joyful about the baby who would “save the people from their sins” even when Mary and Joseph would spend the first three years of Jesus’ life on the run – that was a choice.
Joy at Christmas in the midst of immense division in our selves, families, and culture is not going to activate automatically. It is a choice.
Joy is the muscular posture of knowing, as St. Julian of Norwich said, “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” The child, the incarnate Spirit who walked and ate and drank joy even while feeling the specter of death at his ear, because of that child there is an avenue where we can choose joy.
I watched our neighbor shift back towards his front door. I wondered: will he sit in the yard this year?
As we look at our family crisis…
As we wonder about our jobs in the midst of pandemic surges…
When we tap out our medication, one more time, and drink it down...
Will we be able to choose the spiritual posture of being okay when everything isn’t okay? Will we ever sit in the yard again: in the cool of the day, with our back to the traffic, watching the sun glint off of the rosy skin of the tomatoes?
Joy is a choice.
We are invited to choose joy, today, whatever may come and whatever is.
Will you choose to sit in the cool for a moment even when everything suggests otherwise?