When Even Joy Hums in Minor Keys

As we embark on 2024, I need more than a "happy" new year

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

“Happy New Year,” I guess? Not saying it in a dismissive way—I hope that as you are reading this, you are experiencing health, safety, and joy. It’s just that I have given a go at several posts, starting a little before Christmas, but I just stopped because my spirit was unsettled; my merry is on low. Even joy hums in a minor key.

Life is such a gift; I am grateful. Every day it’s possible this year, I am writing down at least one thing I am grateful for, so at the end of the year I have breadcrumbs to lead me back to God’s grace when I feel lost. But don’t get it twisted, I started this practice not because I am holy, but because I am desperate. I need signs of God’s tender presence.

Every day. Every. Day. I am taking a shower or singing a hymn in church about God’s protection, or kissing my loves good night, or grumbling about having to cook dinner. Every day in the midst of whatever the thing is, I remember that we, all of us, are witnessing another genocide. People in Gaza are trapped in hell. So many are children. Generations of families have been obliterated. The people are defenseless, their food and water sources eliminated. They breathe ash, decay, and poison.

I love, work, sleep, and pray in a country that bankrolls hell.

It’s 2024, and the dominant technologies of the powerful have excelled not in land, sea, and agriculture stewardship, not in public health strides, not in reducing debilitating poverty, but in mass annihilation. The unprecedented access to information, travel, and wealth have led the most privileged to make rockets and bunkers. (We can never count on the rich to love their neighbors—they ain’t trying to live next to us in the first place.) On this, the newest day in civilization, people in both Congo and Palestine are being murdered actively and passively.

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There are some dear friends and loved ones in my life who cock their head at me in wonder when I tell them I love watching Star Trek franchises. They’re not into sci-fi. They don’t get the draw. Here it is: I want to watch shows that depict a future we’ve all but forsaken in the present; a future where diversity is mundane, where there is cooperative education and stewardship of the land; a future where currency is unnecessary and starvation is eliminated; a future where people lead with curiosity and diplomacy rather than violence. Why wouldn’t I want to watch or read the evidence of things I hope for, but can’t yet see? I need to take note of grace wherever I find it.

I feel like we’re being conditioned to normalize genocide, the same way we were groomed to be desensitized to war by scrolling through Twitter and seeing sexy Zelensky memes. The absurd reduction of it all to clips and quotes; the ability we have to just keep scrolling over significant horrors; the weird space where reposting dead children can be an act of informing, or pornographic, or traumatizing. (Also, the technology used to enlighten and awaken us is also abused to prop up Nazis.)

How does one carry on in the midst of genocide? Why is genocide common on this side of World War 2? During my adulthood, there have been too many. Bosnians. Tutsis. Rohingya. Yazidis. Darfuris. Uyghurs. Now, Gaza. My God. My God.

Just New Year. Merciful New Year. Restorative New Year. “Happy” is too ephemeral and the last thing needed right now; a raggedy bandage on a yawning wound of a time.

This is when and where I enter 2024; grasping at words, tearing up as I wash dishes, pleading with God for miraculous shelter, water from rocks, food from the sky for the people in Gaza. Asking Yahweh to remember the precedent set in Exodus, embodied in Jesus. Pleading for an end to genocides. I enter 2024 thanking God for running water, clean and hot, even as I wonder if we will be living in an Octavia Butler novel by the end of the election cycle. I fuss with and feed my boys and try to lean into the love of my husband.

Joy hums in minor keys.