Joy at Christmas is a sticky subject. I’ve been told plenty of times, “Joy isn’t happiness,” but that sheds little light on what joy is or how in the world I’m supposed to achieve it. In the season of advent, when every song on the radio tells me how happy I should be this time of year, the concept of joy is exhausting.
I have always loved the Christmas carol “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” I love the minor key, how the language reflects the writings of Old Testament prophets, and the more somber tone of the hymn. “Joy to the World” has its place, of course, but the juxtaposition of mourning “in lonely exile” with the keening call to “rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee,” connects with a more visceral part of me.
A couple years ago when a few of my siblings told me that I had to read the book Eve by William Paul Young, I was skeptical. I don’t love sci-fi, and his last book had instigated a book burning, right? But I read Eve. The main character of the story, Lily, has endured sex trafficking and forced sterilization, and from her perspective, everything woman about her has been forcibly removed. And as I read her story, I found myself.
If you dug through the massive amounts of bad poetry on my laptop, you would find stanza after stanza dancing around the subject of sterilization, what it means to have your sexuality torn away from you, and how the church’s obsession with purity has done just that to me. I never experienced the horrors that Lily from Eve did, but I recognized her suffering as my own. Neither of us knew what it meant to be women.
In the social context I lived in, my gender served a life sentence to marriage, baby making, and sitting quietly in a corner while the men talked. I embedded myself into the culture like a sleeper spy, acting out the godly Christian woman and covering up the fact that I didn’t want marriage, that I didn’t want children, and that purity culture had so brutalized my understanding of sexuality that I had lost my capacity for sexual attraction.
Eve gave me the construct of sterilization to process what I had experienced, and Lily’s story offered a glimpse of what the grieving process might look like. And somehow seeing my own story in the pages of a book eased the hurt. I was no longer alone in my suffering.
Isaiah 53 foretells the king coming without majesty and says, “Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering.” Emmanuel comes to not only be with us but also bear with us. He shoulders the burden of our sorrows and our suffering, and we, in turn, lighten the load of others. Joy doesn’t berate us to grit our teeth and choose happiness; it calls us to recognize God’s presence with us in the suffering.
At Christmas especially, I find myself drawn back to the prophets, to the mourners in exile, to the poets lamenting the inescapable pain of living. Remaining in a faith culture that has damaged me and pursuing its reclamation often feels like exile. Telling my own painful stories often feels like suffering. But the telling of them invites others to mourn with me, to grieve their own stories, and allow me to carry their sorrows, if only for a moment.
In the words of Isaiah, Eve entered into the space of my pain and bore my suffering. Similarly, when we create art honestly without glossing over the hard, the bitter, the ugly, we step into another person's experience and share in their suffering. The stories we tell and pictures we paint create a space for bearing burdens and for the Burden Bearer, Emmanuel, to bear with us.
Callie Johnson works as Editorial Assistant at Kelli Sallman Writing and Editing with a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts and Creative Writing from Calvary University. She previously interned with Kelli for two years, working as proofreader and copyeditor on several manuscripts. Her strange obsessions include kerning, East Coker, and the sound of cows chewing.