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Tis the season for Joy.
What is joy, really? It’s an emotional and spiritual reaction to Beauty.
We experience beauty with our whole beings. The Joy experience pulls on our hearts and minds. It irrupts into our lives, opening our eyes, changing our perspectives, and moulding our desires.
The theological definition of Joy describes it as a state of delight and well-being that results from knowing God. I can see the veracity of the definition through my own experience of Joy. There exists a relationship between the subject and the object of the joyful experience.
Joy gives movement to beauty.
We see, touch, or somehow experience beauty and what do we do?
We give praise.
We remember. The praising, the remembering, that’s the movement joy produces in us. The Irish writer John O’Donohue says, “Movement is a sign of life.”
Joy breathes out of us; it is our gasp at the beautiful. It is a moment, an experience, a remembrance. If you and I were to cut open the moment of joy, we’d see a portal gushing with the blood of life itself. Leonardo Di Vinci called Joy an “eternal object” within our universe. Joy is like a vagabond-shard of heaven let loose on our prairie’s and mountains and shores. That shard of heaven cuts us with its poignancy because it makes us long for heaven. Why else do we recall the beautiful with delight, accompanied by a sense of the thing slipping away? How is it that you and I can feel melancholy as we remember the beautiful?
Allow me a moment to reminisce about a time I had swimming in the Pacific Ocean. When I played in the Pacific’s waves, I felt delight and a keen sense of horror. Once, during my romp, a wave pummeled me to the ocean floor. The weight of the water pushed my breath from my lungs, and my eyes opened to the stinging salt—foam and white and swirls of water distributed me into the sand, and for a moment I thought about death.
Then, tucking my feet up underneath my body, I pushed up with all my strength. The kick up was barely strong enough to push me to the surface. And when I did emerge, I ducked back into the water, just missing another wave. Finally, I rose between the wave sets. And with adrenaline pulsing through my body like a drug I pushed my way through the chest-deep water back to the shore, coughing, and spitting, with salty mucus hanging from my nose, and a smile tethered to my pale face.
I sat on the hot sand, while a cool breeze swept over me. I shook with hot and cold. I smiled at the ocean, laughing more, marvelling at its strength, which I’d felt all over my body. Finally, at a distance, I delighted in its beauty, caught in the Joy that only crashing waves can produce.
That moment of Joy was God’s hand, that heavenly shard, dazzling through the water and sand and weight of the wave. The infinite caught in moments by the finite. Each time I visit the coast I remember the weight of the Pacific, the taste of sand, and the overwhelming Joy of that moment. And I want it again. Only I’m scared. And then not. And then I’m, again, running headlong into the waves once more.
Have you ever loved a moment so much, you’ve longed for it, over and over and over? Have you felt that keen sense of pain in your longing—your desire pushing you to somehow find the experience again?
I am not always pining for the Pacific. Rather, I long for that moment where my reaction to the beautiful caused me so much Joy. I wasn’t expecting Joy that day. Just to play. And I found the truth that it is in our moments of play, where expectations scatter and can be found no more, Joy finds us, unguarded.
It was in that unguarded moment when I realized this truth: Joy reflects the everlasting nature of beauty. It lasts. No, perhaps not on and on as a feeling that never subsides. More like waves. They begin far off in the middle of the sea and travel far, gathering their immensity, before crashing upon the shore and foaming up into our toes. Crashing waves and foaming seawater—we crave that feeling. And we crave the waves of Joy in our lives, too.
Joy looks like God’s reaching hand in and through the world. It wants to lure us to the Father. The reaching hand seeks to move us in our deepest parts. Karl Barth, the twentieth-century German theologian, who said this about Joy:
“If we can and must say that God is beautiful, to say this is to say how He enlightens and convinces and persuades us. … He acts as One who gives pleasure, creates desire and rewards with enjoyment. … And this persuasive and convincing form must necessarily be called the beauty of God.”
Barth says God’s glory is his “overflowing self-communicating joy.” Joy is God reaching through the beautiful moment, the beautiful vision, the beautiful event, and pulling us towards him. He pulls us to life with beauty.
If we look at Scripture, Joy carries with it all the signs of life itself: Joy in our gestures. A smiling face, a change in posture—we sit more upright or lean into a moment of beauty. Our eyes brighten, our cheeks squish up under our eyes in a broad smile. The ready smile gives Joy up. Think about the imagery of light in Scripture and how it communicates life-sustaining sunshine. We see this in the Priestly blessing found in Numbers 6:22-27
“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”
Think about how the Old Testament describes Joy in worship, even with animals, as the ox flings his head (gesture), or leaves clap their hands (gesture). Have you ever flung your head back and forth in wild jubilation in worship? Have I? Maybe we should. Or consider the wild vitality present in the previously referenced Psalm 29. In this raucous poem “lightning and thunder make the wilderness dance or ‘writhe.’” The lines direct the reader into worship in which the glory and majesty of God sizzles with vitality.
Have you ever turned to a friend in a moment of rapture and smiled from here to the shining sea and exclaimed your jubilation through words like “Wow!” or “Did you see that?” or “Oh my word!” or “YAWP!”(my personal favourite)?
Joy takes over a person. It is our response to the moment—and our response usually takes the form of praise or some verbal form of jubilation.
Remember when Jonathan ate wild honey when he was hungry, and his eyes brightened? Life! Joy! Joy reminds us that we are alive. And not just us. The world teems with vitality, a cacophony of endless jubilation.
Joy also Connects to hope. In Scripture and in storytelling, hope looks towards a future state of Joy. This Joy might be deliverance, like Israel’s hope in future Joy to be found in the promised Messiah sketched through the poetry of Isaiah the prophet.
J.R.R. Tolkien coined a new word related to his storytelling and all storytelling in the faerie-tale genre. He called it eucatastrophe. Quite simply, it was the opposite of catastrophe. Instead of a downward turn in the story, it was the upward turn—the happy ending.
Tolkien modeled this idea from the Good News message found in the New Testament; that of the joyous upturn in human history when Jesus was sent by the Father to restore the relationship between God and man. Tolkien writes, “The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. The story begins and ends with joy.”
Joy possesses a strong forgetfulness. It flourishes greater without the weight of expectation. This is why when you and I walk the park, or the wood, or the seashore with eyes wide open, not expecting, we often find ourselves mesmerized by what we find. We stand spellbound, caught in a moment of eucatastrophe.
These spellbinding moments water our hearts with delight. We mustn’t think delight a mere word for children. That would be a mistake. Delight works in our hearts and minds as a prompt. We encounter beauty, it triggers, even awakens, Joy, and we feel ourselves grow with the desire to know more, to go further, to understand better. Joy leads curiosity in and past the boundary lands of beauty.
Here’s a quick hack for enhancing your experience of Joy during the holiday season: Joy isn’t something you can achieve, it’s something in which you participate; you need only sharpen the focus of your spirit.
When we sense that mysterious vitality in the world, we become hunters for its source. Joy reaches beyond mere feeling and reminds us that something deep within us resonates with our experiences of beauty in this world. Joy speaks of life within life. Like C.S. Lewis says, it awakens our desire to discover the place where all the beauty comes from. Joy, he said, is the “exhilarating moment when one is drawn out of oneself by the lure of something grander, higher, and elusive.”
When we reach beyond pleasure, we discover the prismed world of Joy. It’s a forgetful world, where the worry of “self” falls away, replaced by the beauty of presence.
It is the resounding moment of life being lived.
Joy shakes our heart and our hands as we steady the camera or phone in order to capture the first steps of our child, the first kiss of wedded lovers, the final moment of a graduation. Joy looks like the elegant collection of fine friends gathered in one place.
Joy calls through the resounding landscape.
You and I dip into Joy's world, and we feel strangely at home.
“Do we have to leave the Blue Ridge Parkway just yet? Can't we drive a few more miles? Can't we stop for one more hike? Can't we explore that orchard? Can't we grab a few moments at that pub? Can't we …?”
Here’s what I say about Joy. Blare for me the sound of lightness that echo in the gestures of life; the cataract and the stallion stomp; the echo from the blast. Shout with me, O Pioneers of the green-dotted-road, into the holy tempest called life.
Dance in song with me as we seize glory's power and compress it into a dainty yet holy thunder of everydayness.
I am Joy's talon, shredding, digging, being; into, in which, before, below, through, and seeing.
Rage sun.
Roll clouds and proclaim your surly wild. I ramble with you; me, the broken and strong heaven child.
Sing with me, O Hunters, let our chorus lift; an everlasting raucous of rambling toward home.
If the song of Joy proclaims life and draws my attention beyond myself, then is it any wonder the things that promise to satisfy us in this world ring with vacancy.
I will not allow the pace of this world to steal Joy from me.
I will pause.
I will not allow the digital world to taint moments of wonder.
I will not allow its pace to dictate mine. I live and breathe and have my being from the One beyond.
What is this ambition that whispers lies in my ear?
What is this ugly call to provoke, divide, and be heard?
I refuse to listen to the gongs of a joyless world. I sing to the uncommon commonality of our holy moments. They remind me that Joy's prismed world is not a destination. It is my now and evermore. Stay stoked my friends.
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The Saturday Stoke #16