Thursday, March 4, 2021

Merry

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre laments the loss of the word 'merry':

"Have you ever heard a friend returning from a party describe how merry it was?  Unless you're very, very old, I suspect not.  The word survives in American usage almost exclusively as a vestigial reminder of certain obligatory feelings of good cheer around Christmastime.  But merriment itself seems to belong to a place beyond the looking glass - something we can imagine wistfully as we step into the world of Austen or Dickens, but can't bring back into the milieu of the contemporary cocktail party.  Merriment seems to evoke two conditions of community life we have largely lost: a common sense of what there is to laugh about, and a certain mental health - what William James would have called "healthy-mindedness" - that understands darkness, but doesn't succumb to cynicism." (McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, 30)

I've become familiar with a similar lamentation about the loss of real festivity.  I remember once in a class about Easter that there was confusion about the difference between Easter as a 'day' and Easter as a 'season.'  All we had ever known was Easter as a day, but had no inkling of how to observe a 50 day celebratory season of Easter the way one might observe a 40 day preparation for Easter by, say, fasting once a week.  Is it like a wedding - in which there is an embrace by an entire community of a multi-day celebration?  Is there something in the word 'obligatory' which takes away from the joy one might experience?  Can one only be surprised by joy?  Or if one were to put oneself consistently in a position to experience merriment, joy, mirth, or as C.S. Lewis described the jovial spirit, "desires fulfilled, winter overgone," wouldn't it fall short of our expectations given how much we already know of how abundance, plenty, and 'having it all' lead rather to unhappiness than happiness, dissatisfaction rather than satisfaction, and regret rather than gratitude?  How do we pursue joy without something like greed, and how do we wait for joy without being entirely passive?

Of course, as with all good things, true joy or joy in a Christian sense is only ours through a participation in God.  I like the way Lesslie Newbigin puts it:

"The joy of God is the joy of boundless generosity, of endless giving.  God gives us all things freely, but gives them so that we may also learn to give them up.  Our joy is not in getting and hoarding, but in getting and giving.  The supreme joy is to share both the richness and the generosity of God." (Newbigin, Journey into Joy, 87)

And he shares these with us!  A whole host of societal and personal matters obscure God's joy for us, in such a way that to try to parse it all and cut through it all, by itself, will not be an approach to joy, but rather an increasing withdrawal.  But:

"If from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you search with all your heart and with all your soul." (Deuteronomy 4:29).

The joy of all joys is to know him, and in knowing him to be known by him and to find that he is a fount of any number of qualities and affections like joy, mirth, joviality, richness, generosity, and merriment that may to one degree or another have gone dry from our daily experience.



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