The families I know who are most defined by living joyously have suffered greatly. Heartbreak that is not permitted to become bitterness can become a sensitivity that reveals how much we long for something whole, and there's not much that is. We can find what is.

We know that in this very plain way the power of what is actually whole is accessible and perfected in weakness and we are driven out of grief and into some form of celebration, which is in itself a finishing, completing place. I'm glad to live there. It is finished. It is restored. It has a vastly different quality than the never-quite-bliss that comes from guardedness or deliberate insulation from the broken things.

These families invite the outsider, the potentially bitter soul, the thing with a wrong appetite to take comfort in the truth and to celebrate what is whole. They feel and break and hurt and celebrate and celebrate and celebrate. And host and host and host.