joy

I am having a great time reading Iconography: A Writer's Meditation by Susan Neville (Indiana University Press, 2003). Neville teaches at Butler University, and her book is a series of mediations written during Lent. She faced a mid-life crisis, started inexplicably to take lessons from an Orthodox nun in Indy on how to make an icon, got stymied in this effort, and then took up a discipline to write each day during Lent, an observance she had never participated in, and to attend church each Sunday during Lent, something she had left behind in her life.

Neville is teaching a meditative writing class at the local seminary, Christian Theological, during April. Partner and I signed up for it, then I had to miss the first class last week because of a prior commitment. He came back from the class and commented on an essay she used by Annie Dillard about weasels. I had read that essay about a month ago. We got copies of her book as part of enrolling in the class.

Which brings me to Eastertide. It makes sense to worry and fret and be quiet in Advent and Lent, to reflect, to pray, to confess. Eastertide is about celebration. Fifty days of it. We're not made for sustained joy.

Neville writes:

One of my students came up to me last semester and said she couldn't wait to graduate; four years as an English major, and every class it was life is meaningless and then you die and yada yada ya. And once you got out of modernism and into postmodernism, it was life is meaningless but ironic and funny and then you die. She couldn't stand it. It's like every teacher stands there, she said, class after class, getting all this joy out of saying "you will die."

Big fucking deal, she said.

My friend Andy said that the great undiscovered passion in contemporary literature is joy.