Throughout the Advent season, members of the MLP Board of Directors will provide weekly reflections via email and social media. We hope these words will inspire and awaken you to the hope, peace, joy, and love of this season. Today's reflection on "Joy" is provided by Avery Arden (they/ze), member of the MLP National Board of Directors: Let's talk about the queerness of Mary! The third Sunday in Advent centers joy — a joy that goes beyond extreme happiness, into an abiding sense of rightness that does not vanish in the midst of trouble or grief. This is a queer joy, a binary breaking joy that can coexist with sorrow the way a candle can coexist with shadow. This is the joy of Mary, the joy of her defiant yes to accepting God’s request for shelter in her womb — a yes that put Mary at risk of being misunderstood, ostracized, and shamed by her own community. The teenage girl whom the angel Gabriel hailed as “full of Grace” entered, in the eyes of her society, into disgrace. Queer and trans folk also know what it is to say “yes” to becoming all God calls us to be, which is a simultaneous “yes” to disgrace in the eyes of the world. For Mary, any judgment she faced by human beings could not quell her joy at being a vital part of God’s upturning — the lifting up of the lowly and the casting down of the mighty. May it be the same for us queer and trans folk — may the joy that grows within us as we live into our full selves transcend the troubles that the world heaps upon us. CLICK HERE TO VIEW AVERY'S VIDEO RECORDING OF TODAY'S REFLECTION | 
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