There’s a trail I often take near my house with a sign pointing to “Lily Fields”. For years I ignored the sign, assuming it was just a name.
Then one spring, as I was walking that trail, I glanced up through the trees and there, where before I had only seen rocks and yellowing grass—a riot of purple blooms covered the hillside. Oh…lily fields. The hill opened up to more fields and more fields—flowers dancing in every direction.
Like those lilies, joy is not always found in the expected places. Out in the wild, it grows in its own time, in its own way, quietly gathering strength in the darkness of the soil until—suddenly, it erupts like a song that can’t be contained.
* * *
From my upper bunk, I considered the once white walls now dusted with a fine layer of cobwebs. The lines of Arabic script, scrawled in pencil at various angles, marched across the walls—some in large blocks of text, and others a single line here or there, some with large angry letters, others more subdued. Above the bed were also the spotted stains of something that had once been adhered to the wall, a little bit like gum stains in a middle school locker room, uneven round smudges that formed letters, letters which spelled out words in all capital letters, “FIRST CHRISTMAS”.
I slept under those words, leaned against them when I sat up, and for the most part, ignored them along with all the other congealed substances in suspicious colors adorning the walls. I tried not to think too hard about what made them stick.
However, those letters whispered a foreboding tale: Christmas in prison was a possibility. What woman would decorate for her first Christmas in jail?
Then I realized—it was for a baby.
Baby Adam, for example, entered on Christmas day, the day after he was born. Many afternoons, his mother would rock Adam beside our bunks and discuss her hopes and plans. “When my boyfriend sends a marriage certificate, I will get out,” she told us. Or, “when my sponsor comes to court or gets me lawyer, I will get out.“ None of that happened.
I thought also of other babies—baby Sarah and baby Rosa, baby Samira and Majid and the two Hamoodis, sleeping with their moms on metal beds, their birth the crime.
Did a baby once gaze with unblinking wonder at my walls? Did Baby recoil at the residue, or was he content, nourished by prison issued formula, swaying in his mother’s scarf slung under the bunk bed?
“FIRST CHRISTMAS”.
What is Christmas like when we remove its familiar rhythms and joy seems out of reach? What is Christmas like if we have been disappointed so many times that we don’t dare to hope?
Joy is still there.
It grows in outrageous places — in a manger, under occupation, a baby leaping in a womb.
It’s a scrappy little plant, sinking roots into the waiting, hidden and strong.
Perhaps it’s in faces upturned, arms spread out wide, women rushing into a narrow prison yard to receive the first rain after a scorching summer. Perhaps it’s spontaneous dancing in the hallway to the drumming of overturned mop buckets. And perhaps it’s “First Christmas”—an ingenious gathering of materials, the careful glueing to the wall, one dot at a time.
Christmas in prison is a possibility.
Joy is not just in what could be, but in what is—the rising of joy within a gift.
As long as there is life, joy is a possibility.
Dare we reach deep for it?—deep into that silence, God’s excruciating gift quietly changing the world, one gummy splotch at a time?
Will we find there Christ in us the hope of glory?— Christ who came to us in obscurity, hidden in a womb, during a time of chaos and uncertainty, Christ who taught of a kingdom, small like a seed, a treasure buried, Christ who entered this world where joy and sorrow exist side by side, fully intertwined.
Grief and joy live together.
God with us.
But you see, even then, joy was brewing, breaking through, flashing across the sky for a moment—a company of heavenly hosts, a steady star, the song of a girl, the delight of an old man. Purple blooms.
May our wild, hidden joys also one day burst with a a chorus that alters the landscape.
