I’ve always loved Emily Dickenson’s poem that starts “Hope is a thing with Feathers.” That image touches me. I love that she doesn’t call hope a bird, but instead a ‘thing’ with feathers. I’ve been pondering what kind of a ‘thing’ joy is, but naming the essence of joy isn’t easy. To me, joy is iridescence. Usually unexpected. A weighty lightness. Sparkly fireworks filled with surprise and flickering beauty. Joy doesn’t endure – has a shorter lifespan than hope without doubt, but the residual effect of a moment of pure joy remains in some unnamable chamber of the heart where it is protected and cherished.
I came close to a metaphor for joy recently quite by accident. My dear husband had double knee replacement surgery at the beginning of this month. (All went well, though considering the pain he is in right now, that assertion is a hard sell. It’s going to take a while to recover, but he will. No doubt I’ll write more about this more later but for now, his surgery only serves as the setting for my encounter with finding what kind of ‘thing’ joy is.)
Anyway, as we sat in the surgical waiting room (our daughter Amy and me), entertaining visions of what was taking place in an unidentified OR somewhere nearby, a music-box-like rendition of Brahms’ lullaby came across the hospital’s otherwise silent PA system. Huh. Wonder what that was all about? I gave it little thought. Then, maybe an hour later, it happened again. Curious now, and tired of just sitting and waiting for news from the surgeon, I walked myself up to the reception desk and asked the very kind lady there about the serenade. “Oh, they do that when a baby is born in the hospital.”
There it is! That insubstantial spark that sidelines the worries, the hum-drum, the bad and the worse and replaces it all for just a moment with the unbounded ‘thing’ that is joy. A new baby! A new life! The unexplored promise of a newly created future. We heard that lullaby two more times during our time at the hospital, and each time I was able to stop thinking about how pale Karl was when they brought him to his room, and the weight of the next few months ahead as he recovers, and simply rejoice at a new life just arrived. And that tiny thing – that tiny joy – buoyed me and encouraged me. I really don’t yet have a Dickenson-worthy definition of what kind of a thing joy is, but for now, the lilting tones of Brahms’ lullaby will suffice.
