Sombre Joy
By: Natalie Swann
Tags: Christmas, Lockdown, Sorrow, Australia, Joy

Sombre Joy

Earlier this year, I coached my anxious eight year old son through six months of school-at-home. He didn’t have a play date with anyone but his five year old sister for months. He was sad and lonely. Each week, his school engaged him in ‘wellbeing’ lessons and, invariably, encouraged students to look for the good and to identify things to be grateful for during lockdown. This was useful. But he needed us to also acknowledge and sit with the negative feelings about lockdown too.

Now, Sydney has started locking down just days before Christmas. I have so many friends here in Melbourne whose plans to reconnect with loved ones for the holidays have all just been cancelled. So much grief in a season that is meant to be happy! I am sure similar sorrows are affecting people the world over this Christmas.

Meanwhile, I am also reading kiddo my favourite book: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. The other night, as we read of Ged’s broken return to Ogion on Roke, Le Guin referred to Ged’s “sombre joy” of being with his old Master. This is what my kid needed in lockdown and I think it will help all of us cope this Christmas: sombre joy. Something so much more complex than happiness.

Fresh flowers don’t survive long on the door in an Australian summer. Dried out, but still beautiful. A longer-lasting joy.

I wrote about this in my PhD with respect to the kinds of emotional load that migrants carry and I suggested that the Christian tradition trains believers to be able to hold grief and gratitude together in this kind of sombre joy. Like any settler society, Australia faces an ongoing challenge in negotiating migrants’ memories of past homes and forging a national vision that is something new. There is, however, a pretty common, and quite ugly, response to the sorrow and loss that accompanies migration in the call for ‘grateful’ migrants.

For many, a ‘good’ migrant is a grateful migrant.

But the danger of this call for gratitude, is that too often seeks to stop people complaining, struggling, or recounting loss (unless, perhaps, it is replaced by incomparable gain in life in Australia). Furthermore, there is a sense in this attitude that the gratitude of migrants should look like happiness. Now, there is plenty of research in the psychological sciences to suggest that gratitude does promote happiness. But I think it would be a stretch to suggest that this call for gratitude has at it’s heart the best interests of migrants. Rather it carries the hint of threat — a sense in which loss and sadness need to be buried and hidden from public display — that echoes through the public discourse.

There is plenty of debate over whether Australia is a ‘Christian society’ and in what way Christian values (such as thankfulness) might shape the moral fabric of this country. But this two-dimensional view of gratitude-as-happiness, does not actually mesh with an orthodox Christian understanding of joy or gratitude.

The two most significant Christian festivals — Christmas and Easter — are narratives that train Christians to hold together the complexity of joy and grief, and of immanence and transcendence. Christmas and Easter have lost a great deal of their sorrow in our more secular celebrations of these festivals; they are times to celebrate family, give gifts to loved ones, eat good food together. Perhaps we take time to reflect on our abundance and donate money or gifts to those less fortunate. But they are full of unmitigated happiness; in our mainstream Westfield Christmas celebrations we have kept the joy of the angels, but we have lost the shock — the horror even — of the idea of a perfect God lowering themselves to take on human flesh; the sense of what was forsaken in that moment. Likewise, we remember the gifts of the wise men, but rarely do we recall that they foreshadow the death of the baby they are given to.

When I listen to the stories of people who left their birth homes and have come to Australia, I hear echoes of the question the wise narrator in TS Eliot’s Journey of the Magi asks “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?”. For all my participants expressed some joy at the birth of new life here, but for many of them this went hand in hand with the death, real or metaphoric, of things that they love. My participation in worship and community with them at their churches did not give me any hint of the nature of their grief. It was only in asking them to tell me in detail about their journey here that the nature of their loss emerged. As I have dwelt on their stories, I keep being reminded of words from the book of James, where he exhorts believers;

My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2–4, NRSV)

It echoes the way grief and joy are wrapped up together in Eliot’s picture of the Christmas narrative: that the journey to maturity should be considered joy. It may be hard and painful, but we can consider the journey a joy as we are made more mature, more complete.

I saw this in the migrants I worked with, who don’t express gratitude primarily to Australia, but to God. The stories my participants told me — in which they hold together joy and loss, sorrow and gratitude — echo an emotional habit that Christians practice in the remembering, re-enacting and retelling of key Biblical narratives such as Christmas or Easter.

It was a habit my kiddo needed to learn to cope with lockdown — you can be grateful and still mourn. And, this Christmas, as so many of us face loss and grief, it is my contention that we can hold our sorrow together with gratitude in a kind of sombre joy. I am so very grateful for the way Australian State and Federal governments have contained COVID-19. I am so grateful for my fellow Australians’ commitment to restrictions. Most of all, I am thankful to God who sustains all things and who promises a future free of death and disease. But I am sad for so many things that my kids and I have missed out on this year. Losing out on Christmas with loved ones feels like the last straw. But we don’t have to put on a brave, happy face. We can smile through tears.