Joy in 2020: The Dawn of Advent

 For the last five years, I’ve adopted a fruitful spiritual practice of choosing a word of the year—or, rather, letting a word choose me. For an entire year, I meditate on that word. I study its etymology. I form its letters with my body. I let each letter lead me daily to new words. I seek out poems and other writing that feature the word and gaze at images related to the word with an open heart.

I rang in 2020 feeling less than well. I’d had pneumonia in the waning days of 2019, and although I was feeling better by New Year’s, I was still not totally myself. I struggled more than usual with finding a word of the year, but ultimately, the word “joy” kept returning in the quiet moments when I let my heart sit with the question. Finally, I embraced it, somewhat unwillingly.

Early in 2020, I had booked a much-needed trip “home” with my eldest daughter for my spring break. I put the word “home” in quotes because I’ve now lived in Minnesota for longer than I lived in my hometown, and nearly as long as I lived in my home state. Still, some part of our hearts—if we lived in the same place for most of our childhoods—will always long for that place, even if our relationship with it is complicated, painful, confusing.

In any case, it had been a long time since I had last been to Ohio, where much of my family lives. I was returning home to see my aunt, in her 90s, who was beginning to decline after a long life of independence, and her daughter, my first cousin, who had a mysterious illness that was slowly leaving her paralyzed and had not (and still has not) been diagnosed. They are two of my favorite people in the universe. My wife had generously agreed to care for the four young people living at our home so that I could make this trip with my oldest, who also loves my family of origin deeply.

And then, just before leaving, news of a mysterious virus began to hit the news. Nobody knew what Corona (that’s the only name I had heard for it then) was, exactly, yet, so we weren’t sure how scared we ought to be. After much discussion, we decided to move forward with our trip, although we were aware there was a risk. Not understanding how the virus worked, we decided to stay in a hotel instead of at my sister’s, to be careful about how much time we spent with my aunt and cousin, and to gather only with small groups of cousins (rather than a huge gathering, as is my family’s way)—but otherwise, to proceed as planned.

The trip was full of poignant moments. My daughter and I took a yoga class with my 90-something year old aunt. Later, we sat at my cousin’s bedside on her birthday and sang to her, sharing vegan cake. One afternoon, my sister and some of my cousins gathered at the hotel pool. One cousin talked the front desk attendant into giving us a bottle of Corona, which we all shared.

The next day, the pool was closed, and the hotel closed to any new guests—though we were permitted to stay until our flight home. As the university where I worked also closed, I frantically worked to move all of my office's programs and the class I was teaching online from my hotel room in Ohio.

We took a harrowing plane ride back to Minnesota. During our three hour ride home from the airport, I pulled off the highway to hold my daughter, who was weeping because she already missed our family in Ohio. I had no idea when I dropped her off at her group home late that night that I would not see her again for several months.

I remember thinking, as I listened to Minnesota Public Radio during the last hour of my trip from my daughter’s home to mine, that maybe I picked the wrong word.

But it turned out, I hadn’t. The word joy was exactly the right word for 2020. And in this season of Advent, when that word is tossed around so much that it almost becomes meaningless, I want to explore what I learned about joy this year. Or, rather, I want to explore the question, what is joy, especially in the context of our current historic realities? I’ll be writing at least three times a week from the start of Advent in the Western calendar until the last of Christmas in the Eastern calendar, Jan. 7.

I hope you’ll join me in this exploration. Whether you read regularly or just once in awhile, and whether you engage by commenting or not, I am grateful to share this journey with you.