As I climbed out of the swimming pool just before going into the sauna I glimpsed Jeremy entering the steam room. So I was surprised a few minutes later when he entered the sauna. This morning he wasn’t pensive. He greeted me almost immediately with, “Well, what have you been learning recently?”

Caught off guard, having not fully shifted gears from the physical effort of swimming to just being within the heated sauna, I told him, not what I’m learning, but a bit about how Scott Sonnon, a former student of my husband, had risen to the challenge his life presented. Jeremy listened politely but didn’t pick up on that topic. He had something else in mind.

He told me that after a conversation we’d had in a previous sauna meeting he had continued to explore the same topic with others on three different occasions that day. He was excited about those times of sharing.

Furthermore, he said, that when I told him, “You could write a poem about that,” he had replied, “Not me, I don’t write poetry.” Today he wanted to tell me that the following week he found himself writing a psalm. “What a surprise!” he exclaimed.

Soon afterward he said he had to leave for a 9 A.M. meeting and I was left to ponder my own surprise at what had happened for him and his sharing with me.

A caveat here – I was not surprised that something more had come about for Jeremy. I expect to be surprised. It’s that surprise just always is … well, a surprise! And in the surprise is joy!

When I try to analyze “joy” I get stumped. Like beauty, joy is and defies full description. There is within my experience of joy, though, affirmation that more is going on than I imagine or can imagine. Some of the more – the unnamable – is what has gifted me with an ethos of expecting to be surprised, a paradoxical orientation. My disposition – paradoxical. My joy – mysterious and humbling.

Within its core as well as around the corners of joy is the abundant life of which Jesus spoke, actually, which he promised: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly (John 10:10). I would be remiss not to note here the fulfillment of that promise as I experience it.

Interestingly, Jeremy hadn’t remembered the topic of our conversation. I hadn’t either. “Maybe the subject was imagination,” he’d offered.

If neither one of us had remembered facts, to what had we listened? What had Jeremy heard, that, not only carried him through the rest of that day, but inspired his interactions with others?

He’d heard something. I’ll dare to say he heard the “in between” of us in conversation. He heard the presence of each to other. He heard the phenomenon identified by Donovan in his lyrics of “Two Lovers:” They touch the one of them in the space between.*

The one of them that Donovan knew is the same one of us that Jeremy had heard though we are not lovers – we’re barely acquaintances. But we are keen savorers of the sauna. And within a space and time of barely fifteen minutes we were present, each to other.

It’s the mysterious happening of “in between” that surprises me with joy when I listen closely.

Perhaps, as well, it’s the “in between” that gives birth to poetry.

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