I mentioned a while ago that I’d chosen a word for 2023. It was “ready.”
And I was ready! Ready to go! With my word! Except…
What does one do with a word of the year, exactly? I wasn’t sure. So in lieu of doing anything concrete, like googling, “What do you do with a word of the year?”, I just kind of thought about it occasionally, like you might a two-months’-overdue dentist appointment you’re definitely going to schedule tomorrow.
When my spiritual director asked me if I’d chosen a word, I said, “Yes!”
When she asked me what I was planning to do with my word, I said, “THINGS!”
She nodded, and then, after an appropriate interval, offered me some direction. Find verses with the word, she said, and meditate on them. Look to literature, poetry, song. See how this word has been used. Explore its many meanings and ask for insight into how those meanings are intersecting with your life. Look for the word on signs and in conversation. Take note.
I was taking notes. Tapping them furiously into my phone. When I got home, the thing at the top of the list was “Verses.” So I looked up verses, using an online English Standard Version of the bible. Search: “ready.”
There were eighty-one. I decided to begin with the New Testament. Book of Matthew, chapter 22.
I knew the story. The kingdom of heaven is like a man who’s prepared a wedding feast for his son. He sends his servants out to invite all the best people, but those people spurn them. The servants are beaten and killed and treated shamefully.
But the feast is ready; it cannot wait. So he sends out more messengers — into the streets and the highways and the lonely country roads where goats wander fenceless pastures and men in rags tend them. “Invite everyone,” he says, “Both the good and the bad.”
They invite everyone, and the feasting hall is full with the sound of voices and roasting meat. The man wanders among his guests shaking hands, slapping backs, urging more food — “eat, eat.”
Then he comes across a guest without a wedding garment — under-dressed for the occasion. He asks him why, and when the guest has no answer, he throws him out, into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
As a child, I hated this story. I found nothing to like in a capricious, fickle, angry God who’d invite you to supper then send you to hell for wearing the wrong clothes.
As an adult, meditating on it a bit helplessly, thinking it an inauspicious beginning to my Word of the Year exercises, something different began to form in my brain.
I thought, “Every day is a feast.” Every day, a table of good things is set before me. Dog’s breath on my cheek; warm cat in my lap as I sip coffee; people who need and are needed; the tree with no leaves whose thick branches cut patterns into the sky; the sun bleeding its last joy, like a gift into a world growing dark. All of it a feast for me, and me, all too often underdressed and unprepared, hoping for a bit of food, maybe, or a bit of fun, but holding back, unwilling to commit, to put on the wedding garment, to say, “I am here; I am one with all of you; I am ready for the feast.” How I often I cast myself into outer darkness, peripheral loneliness, soul starvation by chasing demons in my own mind instead of getting dressed and coming to the table.
Yesterday, I woke up early and wanted to know when Lent was. As it turns out, it’s thirty-one days from now. Exactly a month. I stared at the date on my phone in a still-dark bedroom. Then I thought that I should do the thing that was in my mind to do: Thirty days of readiness. Thirty essays at the end of the day, remembering the feast that just was. A reflection on feasting in this season before fasting.
Tomorrow, I will begin. I will call it, “Every day a feast.”