Just Slicing Peaches
Peaches Ready For Slicing
Do you know anyone who radiates joy? Could that be you? Could that be me? Oh no, I confess quickly, I might like to be that person, but I’ve got a long way to go. N. T. Wright has said he thinks there is a serious lack of joy in our world today, precisely because we’ve bought into the lie that the modernist dream will make all things perfect. And, of course, as we look around, we are hugely disappointed. This is surely not the dream for which we’ve bargained. Joy seems crushed by so many forces beyond our control. How can we possibly find joy again?
Miroslav Volf grew up in post-WWII Serbia, under “nasty” circumstances, as he calls them. What lifted him from despair was his family’s nanny, taken in because she had lost everything. She became “the angel of my childhood.” She was the most joyous person ever. She was always singing, no matter the distress under which they lived. She just found joy everywhere.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this nanny. How do we find this kind of joy? Do we just wait for it? Are there things we can do to grab it when it appears?
Such questions send me first to the philosophers and theologians, as is my bent. But I want to suggest another path I’ve been exploring. I find myself turning more and more to the little things in the course of my day. I find myself turning to the poets who often capture those moments.
I am trying to take those small steps, to stop before those little things that may take my breath away, those times, maybe just a flash, when I see new light breaking through the trees, or the sun rising above the hills to the east, or when I am suddenly seized by beauty, spotting “one tiny flower in a land of ash,” as Christian Wiman says in his marvelous book Joy.
In Sarah Lindsay’s poem Small Moth we catch a glimpse of this kind of joy breaking through. See if you don’t find yourself swept up too, standing there with her at the kitchen sink:
She’s slicing ripe white peaches
into the Tony the Tiger bowl
and dropping slivers for the dog
poised vibrating by her foot to stop their fall
when she spots it, camouflaged,
a glimmer and then full on—
happiness, plashing blunt soft wings
inside her as if it wants to escape again.
Notice this moment of joy, as she spots the “plashing [of] blunt soft wings,” first just “a glimmer and then full on,” entering, I take it, “inside” the woman who is merely slicing peaches and spots those wings. This absolutely ordinary moment at the kitchen sink suddenly bursts into something extraordinary. It’s as if the moth wants to be born again. This is what it means to be “seized by joy,” as Wiman sees it.
This is the kind of thing the great nineteenth-century William Wordsworth noticed as he took his walks in the Lake Country. These ordinary events could become within us “a living soul.” This is when we are “made quiet” by the “deep power of joy.” This is when we are allowed to “see into the life of things.” Just a small, ordinary event as when slicing peaches at the kitchen sink?
How can we think about joy in this way up against all the forces of destruction swirling around? Shakespeare thinks about that: “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea”? Does joy have a chance? Isn’t all this stuff about plashing wings and seeing into the life of things just a bunch of irrelevant nonsense?
But then I am reminded that Jesus wants to give us the gift of joy: “I have spoken thus to you, so that my joy may be in you, and your joy complete.” And remember that Jesus often tells us to slow down, stop and consider the little things, those lilies in all their glory, the laughter of children as we stoop down to look into their eyes. It sounds like Jesus is making a promise of joy, but maybe we ought to start out with the little things that occupy our days.
Perhaps if I can touch this joy held out from the hand of Jesus, maybe then the dark forces dragging me down and away from joy will brighten, suddenly. Maybe the plashing of small wings and the scent of peaches will lift me into joy. Maybe this is one of the places I meet the joy of Jesus. I’m counting on it right now.