Joy

Psalm 30

During my last few years at Colby College,
I taught a class, each January, called “ The Good Life”
in which we pondered an array of wisdom traditions’
and philosophies’ answer to the question, “What does it mean to live well?”
And before the class started,
I asked our students to write a little essay,
answering the question, “What makes for a good life?”
And invariably,
the top answer,
boiled down to the word:
“Happiness.”
 
This is not surprising,
we live in a moment in which shared values are a little hard to come by,
and some days, “Happiness” is the best we’ve got.
and we’ve become, I think, a little happiness obsessed.
I recently got a receipt from Chipotle
which read “Build your own happiness.”

 
Which seems a bit of a tall order,
for perhaps the second-best burrito available in Lewisburg.
(I said it.  Mercado’s better.  Don’t come for me.)
 
I couldn’t help but notice,
crossing the border into PA for the first time as a would-be resident,
just over a year ago,
that the sign welcoming you on I-80 says,
“Pursue your happiness.”

the Harris Poll Survey of American Happiness, though,
suggests only about 1/3 of us self-describe as “happy.”
 
We’ve developed an emerging consensus that happiness is:
a) the most important thing.
b) a function of success.
and c) in our control.
 
Which leaves us, on the whole, feeling pretty unhappy, I think.
 
And we took happiness pretty seriously,
in the class,
and pondered its relationship to generosity, and money, and gratitude, and sleep, and relationships.
But in the end, I think,
while many students continued to think of happiness as essential,
I for one,
find it falls short,
and especially so,
because when social scientists are studying happiness,
usually what they’re asking about is:
“subjective well being.”
 
Which is an academic way of saying,
“do you feel happy?”
 
And if I’m being honest,
I feel a lot of things.
I’m  happy you laughed at my burrito joke.
and I’m pretty much tired all the time.
And I’m pleased that our community is growing in breadth and depth,
and I’m devastated about so much that’s happening in our country,
and our world.
And my subjective well-being has a lot to do with how recently I ate my last meal,
and my last set of social interactions,
and how many bedtimes and family dinners I had to miss this week,
and how much attention I’m giving to my deep, deep grief,
about the state of the world around me.
 
Am I happy?
I have no idea.
And, if I’m being honest,
I don’t really care as much as I once did.
 
“Do what makes you happy”
in this sense, at least,
is really, truly terrible advice.
Because what my subjective well-being wants,
a lot of the time,
is to lay down and watch Netflix for just a little while longer.
It rarely wants to exercise,
or go socialize at the end of a long day,
or do my spiritual practice,
or many of the things,
that would – in the long run –
increase my sense of well-being.
 
Now, I don’t pretend that there’s any kind of linguistic consensus about this,
or any real precision,
to it.
But there is something deeper,
to this conversation, than subjective well-being.
 
When the Dalai Lama talked about Happiness,
and he talks about happiness a lot,
he’s not talking about “Subjective well-being.”
But rather the cultivation of the sorts of lives,
and practices that allow us not to ebb and flow so dramatically,
with the world around us.
 
Desmond Tutu,
calls it joy. (The Book of Joy)
“Joy is much bigger than happiness.  He says,
“While happiness is often seen as being dependent on external circumstances, joy is not.”
 
It is, they both note,
possible,
to be joyful, joy-filled even in a world of difficulty,
even in a life a trauma.
 
And I would suggest humbly,
that our scripture goes further:

Weeping may endure for the night,
says the Psalmist,
but Joy comes in the morning.
 
Psalm 30 is the celebration Psalm,
of someone who was sick.
Who knows what it means to be on the brink,
and has come back.
This is the joy of someone declared cancer-free,
after round upon round of chemo.
The joy of someone who can walk upright again,
after an injury.
The joy of someone taking that first clear breath,
after a seemingly endless cold.
 
The weeping is not papered over,
it is real, and deep, and important.
 
And we see this joy all over our scripture:
 
in John’s farewell discourse,
in which, over 4 chapters,
Jesus is trying to prepare his disciples for his imminent,
and real, and painful death at the hands of empire.
“Very truly I tell you,
you will weep and mourn,
but the world will rejoice.
You will have pain,
but your pain will turn into joy.”

After the pain, after the loss,
with the cross in full view,
Jesus says,
on that day, your joy will be complete.
 
In the closing verses of the Gospel of Luke,
Jesus appears to his disciples,
covered in real wounds,
and hungry,
and his disciples are “in their joy and disbelieving and wondering.”
 
Joy – the real kind,
that doesn’t blow in the wind of external circumstance,
and subjective well-being
comes especially,
and perhaps only,
in the presence of wounds and scars.
There is no Easter without Good Friday
no promised land without the wilderness wandering,
no real love,
without the possibility and the reality of real grief.

And in the midst of all the grief and trouble and danger, says Jesus,
is joy.
That’s the real story.
 
And even Paul – grumpy, thorny, bedraggled Paul,
knows joy.
 
As he begins to wrap up his magnum opus,
the letter to the Romans:
he says: Strong people, take care of the weak.
Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you,
and
“May the God of hope fill you with  all you and peace in believing so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
 
And of course, in our beloved letter to the Galatians:
The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
 
Joy and Hope
Joy and Love,
Joy and loss,
are bound up with one another,
and they will carry us through the difficult times.
I think Paul is hinting here,
that joy is a tool for resistance to the empire.
 
It is counter cultural, rebellious, and beautiful
to seek and notice joy in difficult and challenging times.
 
In CS Lewis’s Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,
the Kingdom of Narnia faces its most perilous moment,
as the White Witch,
and the forces of evil are encamped,
Aslan lays dead and muzzled on the stone table
and Peter and Edmund’s army is mostly turned to stone,
and Edmund himself is gravely wounded,
Aslan is raised from the dead,
by the deeper magic from before the dawn of time.
 
And the first thing,
the very first thing he does: is play.
“Oh children,” he shouts to the Lucy and Susan who witnessed his resurrection,  “I feel my strength coming back to me. Oh children, catch me if you can!”
A mad chase began. Round and round the hill-top he led them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost catch his tail, now diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws and catching them again, and now stopping unexpectedly so that all three of them rolled over together in a happy
laughing heap of fur and arms and legs.”
“It was such a romp,” Lewis writes, “as no one had ever had except in Narnia.”
Deep thanks to Debie Thomas for highlighting this text in her stellar recent article.
 
This is perhaps my favorite moment,
in all of children’s literature,
and so lacking from our typical Christian narrative.
First, that joy is a form of resistance.
And second, That Christ, that God,
would play, and be filled with joy.
And it must be so, I think.
 
Or why else would we have rainbows,
and sunsets,
and sea turtles,
and puffins,
and toddlers,
and children.
And each, beautiful individual soul in this room,
and on this campus, and in this wide world.
 
We might introduce another word here:
Delight.
As in, those moments
in which we can help but be made light,
lifted up,
by a pink swath across the sky,
or a fleck of purple in a field,
a child’s laugh,
or a friend’s care.
 
We think, of course, of delight as a childish emotion.
Kids laugh a lot more than adults,
and when they find that truly delightful thing:
that hilarious part of the book,
that ticklish tummy,
that amazing way of being lifted up,
they shout “Again! Again!”
and it’s no less fun the second time,
or third or 10^th,
until your mouth is dry and your shoulders aching.
 
And I think it must be so with God.
Again, again,
God must delight: More sunsets,
more humans.  More songs.
Yes, I’ve heard this before, but it’s so, so delightful.
 
Proverbs chapter 8 is spoken from the perspective of “Wisdom” personified,
and she says:
“then I was beside [God] like a master worker.
and I was daily delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world,
and delighting in the human race.”

If you’ve been around me long enough,
you’ve had to answer the question,
“When were you last delighted?”
I think about delight a lot and I’m increasingly convinced,
it is a muscle we can train,
and a conduit to joy –
especially amidst the stress that surrounds us daily.
 
The poet Ross Gay,
recently undertook a practice, (The Book of Delights)
of writing each day about an experience of Delight.
And he learned something,
and teaches us something.
Namely, that delight is waiting for us,
like tiny burning bushes,
waiting for us to pause and notice.
 
I imagine,
as I rush from place to place,
looking at my email on my phone
God is whispering loudly,
don’t you see that fat squirrel?
isn’t it spectacular?
Have you met this other person,
walking by you, also looking at their phone?
She’s delightful to be around.
 
Joy does not shy away from tragedy,
it knows it, and wraps it up and carries it forward.
That we are not meant to be dour,
in the face of hurt and injustice and all that’s wrong in the world.
Joy is an act of courage and a sort of resistance.
And even more, God must delight in each of us,
and in this beautiful world in which we live.
So we too can practice delight,
even when we’re busy, and stressed, and off to our serious work.
 
Delight surrounds us,
and is, I think, God trying to catch our notice.
And weeping may endure for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.
May it be so.
Amen.