Around this time of year, it’s customary to reflect on the last year of our lives before we look ahead to the next, and I’m a big fan of custom. Though this year ran the gamut of emotion and experience, I keep coming back to celebration.
For me, celebration is nestled somewhere in the sweet spot between gratitude and sorrow. When you’ve been through something so bittersweetly difficult and good as the last year I’ve lived, it feels like celebration is the only possible culmination. I feel warm and tender, open and humble in ways I’ve never been before. Pliable, malleable, soft. Somehow closer to myself, closer to understanding something I was created to understand without having a clue as to what it is.
There are thousands of words I could say for this year.
One of the many voices in my head tells me I’m crazy for celebrating what has been the hardest year of my life. I can’t help but wonder if that part of me celebrates its ending, if nothing else. “Nowhere to go but up,” it seems to say.
Yet many of the other voices don’t say anything, they just smile a weary, thankful smile. I identify with those voices more than the other. It’s the same smile you fall asleep with at the end of day full of work well done, but work that has done work on you, too.
I don’t know that we can celebrate without adversity. At least, we can’t celebrate to the full. There has been much loss, much grief, over these twelve months. There has been hurt and pain and struggle, loneliness and abandonment. There has been joy and relationship, friendship and connection, travel and experience.
I have learned I am safe. I’ve learned I’m loved. I’ve learned grace is actually the most humiliatingly awful thing to receive in the world, and I’d much rather go on convinced that I deserve everything I get – but Grace came to me anyway, despite my best efforts. It has a way of doing that.
I’ve met some of the most interesting people in the world. I’ve met children I’d adopt today if I could. I’ve seen God as far away as foreign countries and as close as the heart of my own family. Friends have come, and friends have gone. Parts of me have died. Parts have come alive.
I feel so filled, and I feel so emptied.
I think celebration lives in that feeling, though the celebration is not itself a feeling. It’s an act of grief and an act of gratitude. It’s a giving and a receiving.
We celebrate to let go and release – and we celebrate to welcome and begin.
Celebration is a discipline of spiritual people. It helps us maintain forward motion in our lives while soaking in the past. It’s the only way to live future and past to the full.
So, this December, I am practicing the discipline of celebration.
I am thanking God through tears for every person and experience that has brought us to where we are, and as I celebrate, I release. I relish that they happened; I relinquish the need to keep them. It is an act of worship through submission as I remind myself I am not in total control of everything that happens. As I celebrate and release the past, its very existence gives me cause to celebrate and take hold of my future without knowing what it holds, celebrating above all the God who gives hope to it all.
And in celebration, this curious intersection of grief and gratitude, I find peace and contentment, my focus drawing ever upward, ever forward, and I gently, sweetly, sorrowfully exhale the most meaningful, heartfelt thank you I have ever breathed.
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