Joy of Every Longing Heart
I wasn’t home for Christmas—surprise, surprise. My family could not plan on me. There will be no snow and don’t get me started on mistletoe. I was not expecting the Christmas and Advent season to be this difficult. I knew it had its challenges, since I spent the beginning of Advent here last year. The summertime weather and lack of snow or general cold does more to your perpetually-prepared-for-blizzards-body than you would assume.
I haven’t written in awhile, mostly due to busyness at work—Christmas breaks and spring holidays galore—and seeking to seize the moment at hand, so to speak. You are in New Zealand for a year, so make sure you use your time well. If you want to surf, it can only happen in your days off because you don’t have a board, and didn’t you want to see the lupins down south in Tekapo while they’re in bloom? Well, of course. So Laura, Jackie, and I piled in the car on a bright Tuesday morning and headed south. Winding through the Hundalees and stopping in Christchurch, we eventually made it down to Tekapo and Mount Aoraki—the tallest mountain in New Zealand. The lupins were pretty dry this year—a victory for the ecosystem and the ecologists sitting in the car with me. It did mean that that small patch had twelve tourists hiding among the faded flowers in an attempt to get the picture just right.
Just a couple weeks prior, we looped up to the north coast, backpacked Abel Tasman, swam in stunningly clear water, avoided the school groups that kayaked to our camping spot, waded through some tidal crossings, and picked up a German along the way. After out tramp, we stayed in a Hobbit Hole, risked our lives on a Flying Fox (look it up, they would never be allowed in the States), and jumped on suspended trampolines.
And in between this gallivanting, I worked. Quite a lot, and in retail, it doesn’t really feel like the most wonderful time of the year, it just feels like the busiest. I have wrapped more presents than I have ever desired or expected as customers hurriedly prepare for Christmas day. And then there came the inevitable returns and questions about exchanges the day after.
Christmas was rapidly approaching, and I felt neither ready nor energized. Some friends and I had watched The Nutcracker on Christmas Eve, so of course we had to practice our rat dances—hunched backs, elevated hands, high knees on the way to church. I arrived to the candlelit service Christmas Eve with my watch telling me that my body battery was at 8%, and the night sky was slowly softening. Jackie and I tiptoed around the carpeted altar, lighting the candles, and preparing the way. Two women in the early bird congregation brought two tea lights from the windowsills beneath the stained glass saints to the aisle for me to light. The clicker for the slideshow somehow was not working, so Laura and I slid to the front pew to change the slides. We whispered about the right time for her to cross the front, leap on a chair, and turn on the lights—during the last slide of O Come All Ye Faithful. The church began to fill up, and I could see visitors, which made me excited. The priest began the liturgy, and we celebrated the Incarnation of a God who would come into a tired and dirty world to be God with us.
Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere does not feel the same, but there is Facetime. And there are carols sung into the folding of the night, with flickering light and camp lanterns held near the read liturgy. There is still the intentional gathering of friends, wine raised in a toast of “Merry Christmas,” and the tired but jubilant celebration of clergy and helpers getting through three services in twenty-four hours.
On Friday I’d call my family while they open gifts and wonder again for the twelfth time this week what I am doing, working a job I’m grateful for but I don’t love, living in a place that feels like it constantly changes, and being a part of a community that is coming to a close in the next couple weeks.
I went back to an article that I wrote a couple years on a Blue Christmas service that I participated in once. And it felt again very timely for this Christmas—there’s a peculiar sadness about not being with family or the weather being all sorts of different than you’re used to. And C. S. Lewis would love to say something right now like, “The ache that lives in you is the one that lives in the world.” Or something cheeky like that.
And that’s true, in a lot of ways. That the ache in me speaks to the ache in you. That’s why we write and that’s why we read, in some ways. The same can be said for joy. I have heard that a lot recently, that joy and sorrow are two sides of the same coin. The joy that you hold recognizes the joy in me. It’s like that African word “Ubuntu”—I am because you are. The human in me recognizes the human in you. So although this Christmas is not entirely what I hoped for, though there may be sorrow on the table, this ache is the flip side of joy. And the joy of gathering on Christmas Day with friends, old and new, each away from family, is an offshoot of that “river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells” (Psalm 46:4). How wonderful that that dwelling is with us.