My third child graduated from high school last week, and we have celebrated bountifully. But just as my second child's graduation will always be intricately tied in my mind to the COVID lockdown, this graduation will be tied to 19 murdered schoolchildren and their teachers in a small Texas town I'd never heard of before.
This post will not be about gun control, police response times, or tragically disturbed young men, which all need to be addressed. My post is about joy. Because mourning and joy are traveling partners in this journey of ours.
One of the things I love most about my kids' school is the senior defense. As the capstone event of their K-12 classical education and as part of their rhetoric class, every senior gives a 15-minute speech answering one of a number of philosophical questions: What is the good life? What does it mean to be human? How does one pursue truth, beauty, and goodness? They must provide evidence of their points through the study they've done in literature, history, science, and math, but the defense is also supposed to be personal, based on something they're passionate about.
My daughter Brooka can best be described as playful. So, a few months ago, when she set out to prepare her defense on how suffering is part of what it means to be human, I wondered how that would go. The answer is that it didn't. She stopped about a week in, realizing she could not spend the next two months thinking, studying, writing, and talking about suffering. So she switched her topic to joy. She argued that to live the good life, one must, in the face of tragedy and suffering, choose to hold onto the childlike joy and wonder we're all born with. She said that no matter how terrible life feels, when she sees an open field, she's going to keep running and twirling her way through it. She talked about making pancakes after a funeral, a reference from The Brothers Karamazov, and how in a world full of pain, she wants to be a pancake-maker.
The news from Uvalde brought a dark cloud--another one--across our nation. As much as I wanted to tune out and close my ears to it, we can't ignore the hard, brutal parts of life, which was also part of Brooka's speech. The good life isn't about running from reality and pretending suffering doesn't exist. We have to sit with it and process it. I watched the news every night last week. I read the newspaper. I looked at every face and read every name of every child who died in Uvalde. I cried and I prayed. Then I went out and celebrated the joy of my here and now: Brooka's final beautiful run at state track, playing cards with our family visiting from Michigan, praising God with other senior families at baccalaureate, walking on stage and presenting our daughter with her diploma, hopping from one party to another, eating delicious food, enjoying warm sunshine, and relishing the past 13 years with families who have become dear to us. Under our nation's dark cloud, we made and served pancakes, literally and figuratively.
Our baccalaureate speaker said that joy is a sword, a reference from Tolkien. It was a helpful picture as I navigated the emotions of last week. I don't need to feel guilty about my joy. I don't have to mute my own rejoicing because I know others are grieving. My joy, our collective joy, is a sword, and it's doing battle for them. Joy pierces the darkness. No matter how bad things get, no matter how ugly and heartbreaking the world seems, there's always going to be joy. The prince of this world (John 12:31) may throw his evil at us everywhere, but he is not the King. He does not get the final word. We're a people made for joy. Sometimes we have to work hard to choose it. Sometimes we have to fight for it. But when we latch onto it, it's a sword in our hands. Keep fighting for joy, friends.
