This is week three of my advent reflections, if you missed the prior two, you can find them here and here, and you are of course welcome to click the button below in order to subscribe and get these in your email inbox, if such a thing would be to your liking.
Happy Guadete (You! Rejoice!) Sunday to all of you. In honor of the day, I wanted to share a few thoughts on joy. Call it a user’s guide.
When we rejoice in a gift, I think, we are rejoicing both in appreciation of the gift itself and in the giver. Gift-giving is a “rich text”, speaking semiotically, involving a “speaker”, a signifier, and an interpreter: The gift-giver, the gift itself, and the recipient, respectively. As with any form of communication, there are multiple levels on which this can break down, but the primary stage is in interpretation, the way we think about the gift. Most of us, at least once, have thought “why did they get me this?”, “this is a size too small, are they sending an elaborate, cruel hint to lose weight?”, or “This is much nicer than what I got them, oh no!” On some level, this is a commonplace instance of the way all communication breaks down: our tendency to project our own insecurities onto thoughts of others, or to fear that we will never be truly known, or a fear of asymmetry in the network of obligations and debts we experience as society. The first two are problems of interpretation, except in the (hopefully) rare case where someone actually takes the Birth of the Savior as an opportunity to Send A Message, but the last is an inevitability, and, I argue, a good thing.
I have digressed somewhat, and I think I ought to explain my opening. Gifts are rarely, in and of themselves, The Thing We Want. What we want is to be given a thing, as evidenced by the relative speed with which an item purchased for oneself loses its luster, as opposed to the staying power of a thoughtful gift. My wife recently bought me a mug in a color I like, with a fun, jokey design on it, which has a pleasant weight to it (an overlooked factor in selecting a mug). I now use this mug almost every day, both because it is a good mug, and because she got it for me. We have plenty of perfectly good mugs (too many, in fact, despite our recent move-and-purge), but that one is a gift, and therefore it is in use. When I drink from it, if I stop to think, I am reminded that my wife knows me well and gave me a gift, purely out of a desire to be kind to me. This brings me joy, and it is very good. I delight in the gift and the giver.
It is also, necessarily, asymmetrical. We did not exchange mugs of equal value. She saw it, thought I might like it, and got it for me. I think I speak for many when I say there is no type of gift-giving, especially this time of year, which is more frustrating than the kind with a set budget. One feels pressured to spend exactly $25, or else one has shorted my coworker/remote relative/etc. This is not how gift-giving works! Gifts are always asymmetrical, unequal, and that’s by design! That’s how the world works!
Every single part of society is asymmetrical, whether it be the family, the friend group, the classroom, church, monastery, or polity, we do NOT get out what we put in. We get far, far more. We are all hopelessly dependent, no matter how much we try to forget that “it is not good for man to be alone” in pursuit of some hare-brained libertarian (or libertine, if you prefer) fantasy.
If you know me at all you already know where I’m going with this: this asymmetry is seen most of all in our relationship to God, who gives us everything, our very being, all goods we enjoy, each other, and most of all His Son, as a pure gift, pure gratuity, pure grace. All He asks in return is what He has already given us, with the promise we will receive far more in return. We have been entrusted with much, and His definition of faithfulness is generously asymmetrical.
Once we accept that all is gift, most immediately from the hands of those around us, and those before us, and then, of course, from God, we have the freedom to simply receive it, to use it as we can, and to give what little we can in return. This is a joyful life, made so by the fact that we know the Giver, and the Giver’s intent in giving.
There: non-bummer post accomplished. No promises on next week, though the topic will be, according to tradition, Love. May God bless and keep you all. Rejoice!