on further notice, celebrate

I’ve been saying all week, unstoppable smile stretching wide, I get to celebrate Adam, meaning that’s at the bottom of everything, and you will think that’s exactly right, as it should be, when I tell you it’s his birthday.

Candles with tiny flames will flicker on top of the chocolate Oreo layer cake he requested, and we’ll pass wrapped presents with curls of ribbon—always some music and this year also shoes for his dancing feet, to the table after a family of forks rests on plates dotted with the remnants of our spaghetti supper.

But let me tell you what I really mean now when I say that, because when you ask me what’s going on this week, your face all kind and genuinely interested, I’m being more efficient than maybe I should be about it.

It’s true, on Adam’s birthday we feast and cheer and remember, gathering treasures with the discarded paper, like the purposeful way Adam reads his birthday cards aloud, launching forth in a readerly voice according to some bizarre autistic synchrony with his wristwatch.  He wears two.  Even in the shower.  And he doesn’t care if the little piece on the band that keeps the tale from flapping disintegrated a year ago.  When I touch it with my finger and say, maybe we should just, he pauses to make rare eye contact before he says, no thank you.

And that spaghetti, with Grandma’s special sauce, has for Adam been part of celebrating every kind of milestone.  Even at two, chubby-legged and flaxen-haired and newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, he danced down there at the end of the table, his cheeks tomato-red, half-starved and finishing off his second plate.  Nearly all his life with a chronic condition, and there Adam still sits, healthy and happy and lean, and that’s a thing, certainly, to celebrate.

I will—of course–remember the days when Adam couldn’t speak at all and give thanks for the grace that explodes now in laughter over his father’s jokes and for that voice of Adam’s, deep and smooth, that, in young adulthood, requests and advocates and responds and loves.  I will sit back in my chair at the table, watching him, and yes, I will celebrate.

But this is what I’ve been wondering:  Will I, can I, also celebrate the days when in anger as a little boy Adam tried again and again and again to beat his own head against our walls and we, he and I, sat at the top of the stairs, my arms wrapped tightly around his while he cried out all that rage, and quietly I told him on repeat, you can be angry, but you can’t do that.  Are those memories worth celebrating?

Can I celebrate even when, after all this time, Adam still dis-connects, still loses himself to murmuring incoherently and paces the house on the balls of his feet to minimize sensory overload?  Can I celebrate on the nights when his glucose meter reads HIGH (so high we’ve beat out all the numbers) and we stay up late, dosing him more and more and more, just waiting on a reasonable reading and sleep?

Oh, tonight I’ll sing, I’ll say, I’ll call out, Happy happy birthday, in celebration, touching Adam’s ears to say I love you, laying my hands over his scratchy, young-man cheeks, remembering the tuft of newborn hair that graced his baby head and the way he squealed, high and loud, like a test of an emergency broadcast system, only a test.  And Adam will reach for me, his eyes shining, his smile sweeping wide to match my own.  But this will not mean, of course it won’t, that things always go easily between us or even that they have today.

Of course, celebration is made for birthdays, unless you or I are not the birthday celebratory kind; unless–we can admit it safely here–in our heart of heart of hearts, we don’t really celebrate much of anything at all.  I don’t know about you, but I’ll tell you about me, that I can look like a celebration on the outside while I’m grumbling on the hidden inside, and I can convince myself that this disharmony is only about being realistic.

I’ll admit it, while you and I are sharing secrets, that I’ve seen that meme that’s out there everywhere, until further notice—celebrate everything, which is a trendy way to say in all circumstances, give thanks, and have immediately begun, at least in my mind, to list the things that aren’t much worth celebrating.  Doesn’t take a beat to start counting them on my fingers, this and this and this, to run out of fingers, and it makes me wonder why counting complaints always feels easier than counting gifts.

What is it in me, really God’s been moving me, like He does, to ask, that will stand in my kitchen weary on the other side of a celebration, on a night like this one, and think, as I drop my hands in the soapy water to wash the cake from the knife, but now this, my mind heading off on a wander, my body forgetting the truth?

I’ve noticed that especially on more ordinary days, I can, instead of getting to celebrate, get tothinking about celebration the resistant, angry way the older son does, in Christ’s famous New Testament prodigal parable.

Have you seen this too, in Luke 15, the older son angry and refusing to go in to the party, the father out there, because He always meets us where we are, begging the older son to come in, to his side?  Suddenly, it’s the older son estranged from the father instead of the younger, and I’m only just wincing at the older son’s hard flung words, at the way he believed, as many of us do, that celebrations arise when meritoriously seeded.  The younger son’s return—no, probably still his hurtful departure, the squandering—is on the older son’s list of things that aren’t worth celebrating.  I can almost see his fingers quavering, smoldering, as he ticks off the reasons.

God’s had me digging, wanting more for me than celebration as an acknowledgement a few times a year, wanting more for me than celebrating what’s obviously good.

“We had to celebrate,” the prodigal father explains to the older son in Christ’s story, “for this son of mine was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.”

No one really thinks of celebration this way, as a must.

There are those, whether or not our global society will admit it out loud, who would even debate whether or not my son’s quiet autistic life merits celebration, and I’m learning that their problem, and the older son’s, and mine, whenever I start to make comparisons on the basis of deserving, comes down to adopting the wrong definition, to missing a critical clue, even in our American English dictionaries, however flawed, and that is the word joy.  En-joy.

A flickering flame of something ignites, a deeper context for celebrating, because the Greek rendering of Christ’s famous story, when the father explains, literally, we had to make merry and rejoice, uses the words euphrainó, that is, the prefix eu, meaning well, added to the word phren, meaning mind, this well mind resulting in expressions of joy, that is, an awareness of God’s grace, both communal and personal, and chairó, to rejoice (re-joy) and be glad inresponse to that same grace.  Meaningfully, the text seems to convey, we must express joy and joy and more joy in God’s grace, we must celebrate, because grace is our repeated experience in all things, including the prodigal son squandering things, the head-against-the-wall things.

I didn’t say it before, but I’m thinking it now, as Adam forks in a mouthful of spaghetti, that I only managed to sit there beside little-boy him all those days at the top of our stairs, my arms wrapped tightly round, his tears soaking my skin, because God stayed too, arms wrapped tightly around the both of us.

This is grace, the treasure uncovered by the dig:  If celebrating is an expression of joy, and my joy is born from an awareness of God’s grace, and grace is always given by God as unmerited favor to me, then my celebrations can only be worthwhile when they’re rooted in Him, because He’s the reality that’s always worth celebrating.

Something happens in that soil, when I am planted there, acknowledging this.

The candles flicker, washing Adam’s face with warm light.  And we sing, happy birthday, happy birthday to you.  And the knife throws light as Kevin cuts the cake.

Hear now, right now, and later, at the sink, too, because this, at last, rings true:

Until further notice, celebrate Him in everything, or, in Him, celebrate everything.

That’s really it, once you get to the bottom of it.