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Finding joy in the midst of darkness |
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By Emilie Lemmons
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Wednesday, 17 December 2008 |
On a recent Sunday morning at Mass, I was glancing at the program and saw an invitation to participate in the Advent liturgy with “a joyous heart, mind and spirit.”
 Notes from a New Mom
Emilie Lemmons
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Immediately, I became angry. How on earth can a person with stage 4 cancer that is progressively getting worse feel joyous, I thought. My resentment seethed, and I sat like a hard stone all through Mass.
When the intentions mentioned those who are ill, I identified myself
immediately and felt like such an outsider — just like the homeless
people and other people on the fringes with whom I was lumped in the
same intention. I felt miles away from normal, and it was hard to
accept.
I’ve been like this for a few weeks now, ever since I was hospitalized
for a week in November for a pulmonary embolism and fluid build-up in
my lungs, ever since a CT scan found even more tumors growing there.
It’s hard to cope when I’m so angry, depressed and hopeless — yet somehow it feels fitting in this dark season of Advent.
In these weeks, we watch and wait, lighting candles that progressively
light the way to Christmas Day. In my own life, when I feel so plunged
in darkness, I watch and wait as I contemplate what those candles might
illuminate.
 What if I allow myself to put the outcome in God’s hands and just live intensely in the present, absorbing and embracing life as it happens?
Emilie Lemmons
Redefining joy
Later that day, I read a few chapters of “Kitchen Table Wisdom,” a book
of reflections by Rachel Naomi Remen, a wise physician and counselor
who brings a spiritual sensibility to her work with cancer patients. A
passage about joy stood out, reminding me of my anger at the word
earlier in the morning.
Telling about people with terrible illnesses who nonetheless choose to
“show up for whatever life may offer,” she describes them as
“intensely alive, intensely present.” She writes:
“From such people I have learned a new definition of the word ‘joy.’ I
had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems
now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be a part of
an unconditional will to live, not holding back because life may not
meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of
the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with
whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to
any particular outcome would deny us. Rather than the warrior who
fights toward a specific outcome and therefore is haunted by the
specter of failure and disappointment, it is the lover drunk with the
opportunity to love despite the possibility of love, the player for
Surrendering our lives to God gives us the freedom to experience real joywhom playing has become more important than winning or losing.
“The willingness to win or lose moves us out of an adversarial
relationship to life and into a powerful kind of openness. From such a
position, we can make a greater commitment to life. Not only pleasant
life, or comfortable life, or our idea of life, but all life. Joy seems
more closely related to aliveness than to happiness.”
The passage felt freeing to me. It essentially says there is a certain
freedom in putting the outcome of my cancer in God’s hands, letting go
of the end result, and just embracing whatever life throws in my path.
I wish it were so easy.
Letting go
Sometimes I see myself in the description of people who fight toward a
specific outcome and are “haunted by the specter of failure and
disappointment.” It’s the mother in me. I rage against the possibility
that I might die and leave my children motherless, my husband a
widower. Even though the medical odds are against me, and my rational
mind knows I could die, it is hard for me to accept death as an outcome.
What if I just let go of that? What if I trust that even if I die
tomorrow or next month or next year, things will somehow work out? What
if I allow myself to put the outcome in God’s hands and just live
intensely in the present, absorbing and embracing life as it happens?
It’s not indifference or admitting defeat; it’s seeing the bigger
picture.
Maybe that’s what was going on last week when I received a surprise
gift in the mail from a group of friends. Inside were a book, a
sweater, some candy, some stationery, all of it beautiful and
thoughtfully selected.
I burst into tears as soon as I opened the package. And while I knew
they were tears of joy, they felt as if they were coming from the same
place deep inside me where my sorrow dwells. It was as if joy and
sorrow were intermingled in an intense response to life.
Maybe that is what Rachel Naomi Remen means when she writes, “Joy seems more closely related to aliveness than to happiness.”
Maybe I am capable of experiencing joy after all. Maybe I don’t need to
approach joy with resentment. Maybe that message is what my Advent
light is illuminating. I pray that I can enter into the lesson God is
trying to teach me.
Emilie Lemmons and her family live in St. Paul and are members of St.
Thomas More in St. Paul and the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis.
Her e-mail address is
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
, and her blog is at
www.lemmondrops.blogspot.com.
UPDATE: Sadly, we must report that Emilie Lemmons passed away on Christmas Eve. We invite you to read Joe Towalski's story, "Remembering Emilie."
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