Dance and Weep

“To what can I compare the people of this generation?” Jesus asked. “How can I describe them? They are like children playing a game in the public square. They complain to their friends,

    ‘We played wedding songs,
        and you didn’t dance,
    so we played funeral songs,
        and you didn’t weep.’

For John the Baptist didn’t spend his time eating bread or drinking wine, and you say, ‘He’s possessed by a demon.’ The Son of Man, on the other hand, feasts and drinks, and you say, ‘He’s a glutton and a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and other sinners!’ But wisdom is shown to be right by the lives of those who follow it.

― Luke 7:31-35

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Dear Kate,

A conspicuous absence, consider that, the missing substance spoken thereof, and the expression itself.

If something is missing and manifestly so, how would you know?  It is not there after all.

By the empty space that it would, should otherwise occupy?  By the presence of a substitute, a counterfeit necessarily, layer upon layer of lies to cover up and fill the void, heavy caked-on to make up what has long left a face: youth?

A conspicuous absence is a telltale nothing of our self-styled something, and what do you think I am talking about specifically, this time of year, like a cosmic manifesto, a divine credo that cannot be contradicted even by the most cynical of pagan hearts?

Joy.

Joy is supposed to be in the air.  In our heart.  In everything we see and hear and smell.  In how we warm a branded cup of coffee with our mittened hands as it warms us, pull our nose up as we pull the aroma in, being filled with a deep satisfaction that passes the threshold of make-shift happiness to reach the terra firma of rock-solid joy.

The gaudy display of our joyfulness, is, then, only natural.  We can't help it.  We are so damn joyful that if vulgarity is the consequence we must allow all its consequentiality in the month of December.  Believe! we evangelize each other as we excavate our heart for what we know must be there: a wellspring of endless delight, indefatigable goodwill, and transcending hope.

Many things we find in our heart, bloodied now by our own careless and reckless heavy equipment operation.  There in the ruins a conspicuous absence: something stolen, something swapped; something spoken, something silenced; something once thrived, something died.

We don't grow joyless by January.  We just tell ourselves stop being stupid.

Yours, Alex