rejoice in the Lord

-- Update --
More thoughts on joy, sorrow, and gratitude:
quotes from Amanda
thoughts from Carolyn
and a poem from my Marianne
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At this time last year, I was pondering the effects of spring, watching the first signs of green appear, watching flowers slowly trying to open up and face the sun. I thought of how painful it was, when roots begin to thaw and the first green appears, brought out into the still-too-cold air by the cool spring rains. My head was filled with the words of T. S. Eliot:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

~from The Waste Land

But I knew that I had to let go of my fear of the open air. It was time for me to grow.

By God's grace I have grown - I hope I am still growing - and I find now that the cold and rains and growing pains of spring bear with them something that I had neither expected nor dared hope for: joy. I was reminded of a book that I read many years ago called Hinds' Feet on High Places, which talks of a little flower called "Acceptance-with-joy." The Lord is turning me into this flower, each day more so. Many times over, the Lord has showed me how these things - acceptance and joy - do not appear together instantaneously, but one always grows out of the other. True joy can only come from acceptance, and out of true acceptance, slowly but surely, must grow joy.

So often, I want to be reassured of the joy beforehand. I want to know exactly what that joy is and how and when it will appear. Is that acceptance? No. Acceptance is, however reluctantly done, the action of faithfully taking hold of Sorrow and Suffering and by grace moving forward. The road is hard, but joy which springs from it would be unheard of - or if not unheard of, then completely misunderstood - along any easier path.

In this, then, is joy: not in a denial of suffering or pain, but in an acknowledgement that Love is one mystery from which spring both sorrow and joy. It is an acknowledgement that the Lamb who stands as one slain, the Risen Christ still bearing the open wounds of His love for us, wants us to share completely in His life: in His cross and His glory.

One Foot in Eden

One foot in Eden still, I stand
And look across the other land.
The world's great day is growing late,
Yet strange these fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate.
Time's handiworks by time are haunted,
And nothing now can separate
The corn and tares compactly grown.
The armorial weed in stillness bound
About the stalk; these are our own.
Evil and good stand thick around
In the fields of charity and sin
Where we shall lead our harvest in.

Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.

Edwin Muir

I don't agree with all that this poem says; to claim that love and charity were unheard of in Eden seems very wrong to me, but it expresses beautifully how the fallen world in which we live provides a way for God's power to be known as His glory shines even in the midst of darkness. Or put another way, in the words of the Dread Pirate Roberts: "Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something." I could never claim otherwise, but this cannot keep me from saying also that life is joy. And where does this joy come from? The joy of the Lord must be our strength.

I pray that in this Easter season, you may fully experience the joy of the glory of God springing from the fertile soil of acceptance and watered by His love.