Christmas morning, my 77th, I sat on the side of the bed feeling weighed down by a peculiar sadness. I say peculiar because I couldn’t define it. It wasn’t loneliness. I’ve been alone many Christmases. It was something else that I couldn’t place.
I’d spent musical Christmases singing to nursing home patients, school children, and incarcerated men and women. Their presence was sweet and satisfying, like a good wine on the back of the tongue. I’d spent Christmas in an ashram in India, enthralled with the magic of the people and the heat. Christmas in temples, churches, and spiritual retreats left me swooning in the magic of sacred music. In each place, there was light in the faces of the people, a brightness. I dare say, a tenderness.
I sipped my coffee, chewed on a waffle, and considered this.
As a child, I received splendid gifts on Christmas morning: a toy nurse kit that included a stethoscope, a miniature microscope, a dollhouse, and paper dolls with cut-out paper clothes. My brothers received model airplanes and warships. It feels like I can still smell the glue. My sister received a full-sized doll as large as a three-year-old. Candy canes and oranges came in Grandaddy’s bulky packages of fruit, nuts, and other goodies. Eating the contents of those packages never gave me a bellyache, which meant I was well enough to ride my first two-wheel bike with my father walking beside me. The gifts made me happy; they gave me pleasure. But the love gave me joy.
Defining joy,Merriam-Webster says, “…a feeling of great happiness or pleasure: delight,” and Cambridge Dictionary says, “Great happiness or pleasure.” But pleasure is not joy.
There is considerable discussion about the distinction between happiness and joy. From what I gather, happiness is dependent upon external realities: the food we eat, the places we go, the people we are with, or the material things we gather. Joy is an internal state of well-being, contentment, maybe even gladness. Gratitude produces a state of joy.
On my 65th Christmas, my holidays changed forever after a diagnosis of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which became a chronic relapsing condition that left me blindsided. Six months of hospitals and rehab, medications with strange names, and IVs three to four times a week left me sad and fearful. My friends became heroes. One gave me an artificial tree with lights. Others came by and brought small gifts. These things and the company brought me happiness. The love behind the gifts brought me joy.
I was baptised at ten years old. As my body was lowered into the pool of water, I could hear the church members singing Take me to the water to be Baptised. I was underwater for only a moment, but it felt like an eternity. As Reverend Cole lifted me out of the water, I experienced a tranquility, contentment, and open-heartedness that I will never forget. I was filled with Joy.
So where was that joy now? Maybe it was waking up to the realization that I would soon be 78. No!
I have figured it out. On the morning of my 77th Christmas, I was missing joy. I also realized that, for me, in the background of every joyful experience is the hum of creation in the form of music. Christmas carols, Gregorian chants, traditional African-American hymns, or Eastern-based chanting. Whenever, wherever there is music, joy wells up within me. It reminds me of a verse from a rendition of a spiritual I love.
Over my head, I hear music in the air. There must be a God somewhere.
Christmas is gone, and my life in this village is filled with snow and ice. There are clouds and empty tree branches. But there is sunshine. There is contentment. There is sweet music. And there is joy.
Sala
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