Sadness and Joy

Mike Mason says in his book Practicing the Presence of People that sadness and joy are neighbors. There have been seasons, including the present one, where this truth has been painfully present to me. Since last year’s move I have had to acknowledge a lot of loss. Despite never quite feeling at home in Florida, I had nonetheless built a life for myself. That life was suddenly, permanently gone one Thursday morning last July. Life has moved on, but the grief of that loss has weighed on me since late last year, at times near-crippling and at others almost imperceptible.

In that heaviness I have also found something else: an openness to beauty to which I cannot say I am always sensitive. For instance, I was moved to tears reading “Luna of Tasajera” in Plough and viewing the pictures. I found deep beauty and truth in the author’s words, and also deeply resonated with the visual storytelling, the pictures of the young girl Luna, also captured by the author. Reading the article, I was reminded that Luna, her family, the people of El Salvador, are fully alive people and that we do violence to them when we flatten them into mere victims. How wrong we are to reduce her like this! Her story is mine, not in the sense that we have experienced the same or equal injustice, but in that we both experience joy alongside suffering. Suffering children can still run down beaches, arms flailing, appearing to “choreograph the sea.”

If this season weren’t uniquely trying for me then I am not sure my soul would have the capacity to experience the beauty of a little girl on the beach in El Salvador. Seasons of even small suffering thin out my soul. As uncomfortable and even painful as that is, it puts me into a liminal space that allows moments like this to permeate. This is, I think, joy à la Mason.