Life Has Infinite Joy

(I italicize all lyrics/poems in this entry. This, however, is not a lyric. Nor it is a poem, unless you want it to be.)

The view from Assembly Inn is gorgeous. I was never much for nature when I was young. My brother and I were of the computer nerd variety. One summer, we went outside, only because my computer needed dusting. We sat it out on the gravel of the driveway, wincing from the sun, freaking out at bees and generally acting like the pale insomniacs we were, unused to sun or heat. We ran inside as quickly as we could after blasting my computer and anything that buzzed by us with compressed air. Having been deemed allergic to the entire outdoors, particularly anything green, I've stayed huddled inside most of my life, and moved away from the suburbs and into the city as soon as possible. The one exception was when I would come to Lake Junaluska and Montreat in middle or high school, where you could barely keep me inside. There is something about these mountains that opens me up to nature, and stills the part of me that freaks out when flying insects zoom by.

Even going to the grocery store, here, is beautiful. The parking lot of Amazing Savings on 70 has a magnificent view. But I don't believe that anything is inherently beautiful. We decide what is beautiful. We find and choose beauty. So then I've asked myself, "How can I find such beauty when I go to Morton Williams on 23rd?"

I have genuinely smiled more often than I can remember this summer. I have been so full of joy.

Many years from now,
Will I still have this mad joy?

Montreat is indeed "a place set apart". Something about the landscape and the people and the work that happens here makes it easy to see the beauty. Easy to see God. It is a thin place. It is easy to encounter beauty and discover joy. But I'm only going to live here for a couple more days. It is time to come down from the mountain. How do we hold on to the experiences we have at places like this? How do we use them to change the way we live? I think it's in living. In experience. In senses.

I went to look for joy
Silm, dancing joy
Gay, laughing joy
Bright-eyed joy
And I found her
Driving the butcher's cart
In the arms of the butcher boy

When I first heard this, I rejected it. That was not my idea of joy. It was too simple, too common to be joy. This summer, though, I've realized that joy comes hand-in-hand with living. Experience. Sensuality. Feeling. Emotion. You can find it crafted and pointed in a theatre, and you can find it majestic and towering on a mountain, and you can find it excited and shimmering in a local talent show, and you can find it wild and sprawling in the grocery store. Everything is valid. Every experience, every emotion, every sense. Life is for the alive.

I worked a barn dance the other week. I hadn't really gone to barn dances this summer, often because I was working some event. (AV doesn't normally have to work the barn dance, but there was a different band that week that didn't have their own sound system.) These free barn dances are traditions at Montreat; they started in 1968, and the same person has been calling them since their beginning. Watching everyone from small children to teenagers to the elderly join in this tradition, a part of this culture, my eyes started to tear up. It was one of the most beautiful things I had never seen. Life, a celebration.

I have historically scoffed at things that I consider to be "simple" (or "normal", but I don't use that word much anymore). I ran away from the suburbs to Study Art In New York City. My mother has heard me say, "I'm probably not getting married," often (usually suffixed with, "..but if I do, I want the Widor Toccata as my recessional,") because the assumption that I would definitely grow up and marry some nice gentlemen is one I rejected as being too common. But I'm also attracted to simplicity. I first really noticed it in my earnest desire that comes up every so often to become a nun. I'm not meant to be a nun. I know that's not using the gifts I've been given. But the simple, ordered, focused lifestyle appeals to me, probably because my mind whirls a mile a minute and there is everything but simplicity inside of it. Similarly, at the barn dance I thought about a quiet life, a small job, a house, a family, and the biggest weekly event being the weekly barn dance. The sensation and color brimming inside that picture warms me, charms me. It is beautiful.

Ironically, the reason I can never be fully satisfied with that life is because it's too beautiful. Life, really, is too beautiful, and it fills so much that must share it. I must run and tell everyone.

Despite my so-called "maturity", I have recently discovered that I am actually five years old. I am so easily excitable. It's very easy to make me happy. Yes, I'm often very calm and collected, but tell me that I'm able to take Voice and Speech next semester and it's like telling a small child that they get TWO birthdays this year. It's almost ridiculous. There is so much emotion, so much sensation, so many thoughts, and I have to share it. When something extremely excited happens, I tell my roommate, I call my friend, I call both my parents, preferably separately, because it's actually too much for me to handle, myself. I think this is part of the reason I love classic musical theatre. I don't think I've ever seen such a celebration of life as in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. She is in love. She has to sing about it. They are living and loving and surviving in Oklahoma. They have to sing about it. It must be done.

I read all of the gospels this summer. (I'm working on Acts now.) A theme throughout all of them is those who are healed running and telling everyone they meet about what has happened, even if Jesus specifically tells them not to. They are filled with such joy, they cannot keep it in. It hurts to bottle anger; it also hurts to bottle joy. When we have an encounter with God, with the Holy Spirit, with the living Christ, we are compelled to shout it. Moses and Miriam singing when the Israelites are saved from Pharaoh. The Magnificat. The Samaritan woman, after meeting Jesus at the well, saying, "Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?"

I believe in the sovereignty of God. This means I believe that God is in everything. Yes, everything. I am often attracted to dark stories because I see the light in them. It's nearly impossible for me to get away from it. And because I see it so clearly, and because I love people, I am constantly called to say, "Come, see!" It it too much for me alone, too much to be expressed in any way but art.

To be honest, art even falls short. People may argue with me, but I think that nothing can ever be truly expressed. Language is both freeing and limiting. I am obsessed with that which is untranslatable, and the ways we try to express it. But in trying to express, we create something new, something surprising and unexpected.

We never know what affect we will have, or what we create will have. One of my dearest friends has been going through some rough times, not unlike, at the core, the rough times I went through that inspired my final design project from my first year of college. I attached the first stage of that project - a collage text - to an e-mail to her back in June, in hopes that she might find some echo in it that resonated with her. Over a month later, she told me that she had been poring over it and that it anchored her when she sorely needed anchoring. When working on that text, probably at 3am, I had no idea what audience it would eventually reach.

I have no idea about a lot of things. All I can do is attempt to guess at strings.

What I do know is that there is so much more to the world than I or any of us can imagine. Because there are more people than we could ever hope to know, there are more ideas, there are more experiences, there is more beauty. Because God cannot be defined to any of our systems. I know, in some place deep inside of me, that there is more to the world and to life than we immediately see. In each voice, in each touch, in each sight there is a glimpse, a discovery of something we have never known before. There are more colors than those we recognize in this world. This I speak with absolute certainty, because I've seen one. In one of my most powerful synaesthetic responses, I saw a color that does not exist. Not a combination of any colors I know, but a completely new color I had never seen, one that we do not know in our world. There is more than what we think we know.

Life is running recklessly with arms outstretched, fingers spread, into this exciting unknown, sped on by curiosity and joy. Jesus said that one must become like a child to enter the Kingdom of God. I joke about how I grew up out-of-order, or too fast. My mother called me her "serious one". I was 7 going on 35. And now I wonder whether I just grew up backwards, if I grew up to become a child.

There is a theatrical piece that one day I will direct. This was made clear to me two years ago, despite my Moses-like protests. Leonard Bernstein's MASS. It is a magnificent piece, straddling the religious and the theatrical and the secular, weaving together many different views on religion together to come to an honest start to a search, not a "tie it all up with a nice pretty moral" conclusion. It's so absolutely my kind of piece, but you'd have to be insane to really want to do MASS because it calls for a choir, a street chorus, a boys choir, a full orchestra, a band, recorded sound coming through various parts of the house, banners, liturgical dancers, rock and blues soloists, and several operatic soloists. (It was commissioned for the opening of the Kennedy Center and has rarely been performed in full since. I saw a not-quite-full production at Carnegie Hall last year.)

Coming out of the most intense, forsaken darkness of the piece, is a single strand of hope in a child's voice, singing a simple song of praise. Slowly, his voice is joined by others, repeating Lauda, Lauda, Laude!, until they grow and burst and swell and the whole space sings and echoes with joy and praise. When I saw MASS at Carnegie Hall, all I wanted to do was stand up and join in the song. What I see is a song that does not stop. What I see is the song spreading to the audience, to the world, as everyone cries out laude, laude, laude, resonating across these mountains and valleys, seas and plains, cities and sidewalks, into the heavens and God's ear. This song is woven into everything. It is God. It is the Spirit. It is the Universe. It is wonder. It is beauty. It is hope. It is joy. It is love. I have seen it this summer in the mighty mountains and in night skies where the moon and the clouds create ethereal colors. I have heard it in the prayers of conference leaders before opening the doors at keynote, and in the soaring harmonies of vast choirs. I have felt it in the caring words of teachers, the guiding hands of potters, and the embrace of pastors. I have stood dumbstruck by it while looking at architecture, or at the Met or Cloisters or PS1. I find it giggling and hidden down allies in New York. I am moved by it in the valiant efforts of a people working to survive. I tasted it in a kiss, and it tickled my ear in the whisper of a confidence. It has reached out to me and grabbed hold of me as I've sat sobbing in the last row of a theater's mezzanine. It is present in everything and everyone, whether beautifully obvious or craftily hidden. It is in the stories we tell, in the words we speak, in the smiles we give, in each breath we take.

That is, it is there if we choose it. If we choose to seek it, live it, and share it.

It is easy to chose destruction and negativity. I have been there, I know it. It is even easier (and far worse) to not make a choice at all, and drift into apathy, which is akin to falling asleep when we have been clearly instructed to "Keep awake!" I have been there, I know it, too. But I have made a choice, to devote my life to this song. This is what I celebrate. This is what I serve. Simply, the fact that there is good in the world. That is worth my life. Service to this song is service to the world, and all the miraculous people there are to love and learn from in it. I know of no better way to spend a life.

And the song she sang, believe me,
Will never, ever leave me,
And it will be upon my lips 'til the day I die

And it will be upon my lips 'til the day I die.


I will still have this mad joy.


Alleluia! Amen.