joy, accordion-style
“When it’s time for Adam to do his roller coaster move,” my friend says, speaking of this year’s dance choreography, “we do it one by one, in accordion style, and Adam starts laughing and doesn’t stop until it’s his turn.” She grins, absorbed in the memory of dance practice. I watch faint steam curl out of the lid on her caramel macchiato. She fingers the cardboard sleeve with her thumb as she continues, that grin stretching, “And then we all start laughing too, because he’s laughing.”
Isn’t it a wonderful thing, the way laughter can express joy, spilling and spreading like sweet water tumbling through the desert, coming for the thirsty?
I have written it in my planner this month, this week, the letters curling through the banner over the week, that I want to en-joy this time of year instead of surviving it. I wrote it remembering something God showed me, that joy is really the awareness of grace, and so to enjoy is to let all of living, even the obscure and the gritty and the hard, fill with that awareness.
God has shown me that the only way to really ever be full is to be filled by Him.
Just listening to my friend’s story, I start laughing too, sitting in that coffee shop with the sweetness tingling on my tongue, thinking about how God gives us joy for spreading, for always tasting His goodness.
I’ve been thinking, in Advent, about how Christ brought joy even before He was born, how pregnant Mary walked in for a visit with her even more pregnant cousin Elizabeth, both of them filled up with the Spirit of God, and Elizabeth saying, “Look, the moment you said ‘hello’, the baby inside me leaped for joy.”
Joy is, after all, the soul’s first response to Jesus, a kind of leaping, arms-open-recklessly-wide joy, and maybe you’ve heard it already more than you’ve felt it, but it bears repeating: Unspeakable joy is something entirely different than happiness over circumstances, something wholly separate from our comfort. Joy is the recognition of God.
In my mind, as my friend speaks, I can see Adam’s face, that broad, reckless smile. I can hear the sound of him spilling joy, how his deep, jerky chuckles develop into full-blown glee until finally it’s his turn to dance, and he throws up his arms, like he’s reaching for God, and shimmies, making his long, lean body ripple like it’s carried along by Living Water. I know because I’ve seen Adam’s roller coaster move; it’s the only piece of dance choreography he’s ever shown me in advance of a recital.
Adam has become my reminder that joy doesn’t just shimmer inside me like a pretty idea, that it moves, as the propulsion of love.
My friend, herself a beautiful, experienced dancer, told me some time ago that at the start of every dance season, the company forms a giant inspiration circle in the studio. I don’t remember if she used precisely those words, inspiration circle, but I do remember that as she described their creative process I couldn’t help thinking about the Biblical Greek word for inspiration, theopneustos, which combines the word theos, meaning God, and pneuma, meaning breath. Pneuma is the word translated Spirit in New Testament scripture. So, from that perspective, inspiration is literally the exhale of God’s Spirit. Scripture self-describes using this idea, proclaiming that all scripture is God-breathed.
In the dance circle, the company begins the process of creating each season’s choreography by sharing a theme and a prompt, asking each dancer to contribute, if possible, not just with a verbal response but with an articulation of movement. In light of Adam’s autistic challenges, adults in the company have assisted Adam through this process in the past by offering him some appropriate responses from which to choose.
But this year, my friend had told me, eyes sparking with her own fiery joy, it had all happened a bit differently.
Tell me about a time you had to be brave, the choreographer had prompted, as they began collecting inspiration. I imagined Adam standing at the edge of a slightly wonky circle, wearing his navy blue “sweat jeans,” as he describes his sweatpants, and the Appalachian State t-shirt he always wears to dance, bobbing his head in time to music no one else can hear, looking sideways into space to listen.
That day, before any of the adults could offer Adam the usual possibilities, he had started telling his own story, throwing his hands above his head, twisting his body and grinning wild as he said, “my first time on a waterslide.”
They were blown away, as I always am by the unexpected goodness of such moments, by grace, the awareness of which bubbles over as joy.
When Adam dances, joy floods, and that day in the inspiration circle, it had been, to my mind, as though a crazy-powerful, untraceable Wind had rushed through, giving Adam the words he needed.
“It was so good I cried,” my friend had said, marveling out loud, while I marveled at the grace she had just imparted to me, at the joy spreading, as I realized what it had taken for my son to set aside his anxiety that first time at the water park, as I realized that he, who so constantly suffers from sensory oppression and overwhelm, had been brave that day and had, as a result, discovered his love for waterslides. He had taught me so much over the summer about resting in the river of God’s delight. We do have to be brave, nearly every time, just to lay back and trust.
After hearing about this process, I had asked Adam to show me his waterslide move, and he had laughed, throwing his arms into the air to dance for joy all over again.
Today in the coffee shop, all this has me simmering with a question, as I sit across from my friend thinking of joy accordion-style, remembering how she’d told me Adam’s waterslide move came to be, as I imagine his giggling anticipation during practice as he waits for his turn to dance.
If joy moves, if it literally leaps in recognition of God, could my joy make even my most straining movements into a kind of dance before the one who loves me?
We are, after all, those of us who know Him, kind of only standing in a crooked line that stretches for all eternity, breathing the breath of God, watching as witnesses of His grace, waiting for our turn to dance for joy, for our chance to watch joy then spread from us in every direction, like sweet water tumbling into a desert. We know, after all, that this is what our Christ has always wanted, for His joy to be in us, for our joy to be full.
