Joy
It’s not just an Ecclesiastes kind of thing.
by Rachel Barton
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine closed an email with this exhortation: “You deserve joy, my friend. Don’t ever forget it.”
I confess I was taken aback. Deserve joy? Like…I just get some? Just for being a human?
Truth be told, I’m not totally sure “humans deserve joy” is belief I ever learned, let alone one I could forget about. Joy, as a feeling that exists for its own sake, is not a concept I think about very often. Joy for its own sake is something that a frivolous person might waste their time on. I have things to do. I have no time to waste.
But Advent invites us into a different kind of time: a time for making space, a time for waiting. Advent is a time to breathe in and out, and this week, a time to attune our hearts and minds to joy.
Joy.
When I do think about joy, I tend to think of it as a feeling experienced as an outcome of fruitful labour. Like a good New Englander, I start with the kind of thinking one can find in Ecclesiastes 2:24–25:
There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from God, who can eat or who can have enjoyment?
Joy as an outcome of hard work makes sense to me. Joy when you finally finish a project you’ve been working on. Joy as the feeling you feel when you work side-by-side with others in pursuit of the same goal. Joy as the satisfied sigh at the end of Celebration Sunday, when we all saw with fresh eyes what our church could do and who our church could be again.
Joy, it turns out, is a good feeling I think you earn.
And that means I’ve missed something.
I’ve missed something, because even though we do experience joy in our work, joy is also one of the Fruits of the Spirit, and Fruits of the Spirit are gifts freely given by a generous God. That means joy has to be more than something that comes from something we do. If we believe Paul (and we probably should), joy must have an irrepressible, bountiful, surprising, overflowing-with-spirit side to it that we don’t have any control over at all.
This is the kind of joy that can feel uncomfortable if joy is mostly understood as a righteous outcome of righteous work. This unearned, freely given joy. This joy that pops up watching a grandchild’s dance recital, or in the sound of choral harmonies, or in the sight of a lit pine tree on the Lexington Common.
This kind of joy, this free joy available to anyone, anytime, disrupts the story that says we get what we earn. It disrupts the story that says we work now to get our joy later by inviting us to see the world a little differently. To see it less like a flowchart, and more like the night sky: beautiful, disordered, out of our grasp, and powerfully wonderful.
Joy unrefined, for the sake of itself.
This kind of joy disrupts the story that says you only get what you earn the way Jesus’ birth disrupts the story of the whole world: by showing up unexpectedly, and inviting us to see our world, and ourselves, differently. We are not required to recognize freewheeling joy any more than we have to recognize Advent. It is entirely rational to declare that stars are just gigantic balls of gas, and that waiting is a waste of time, and to get back to work. The stars won’t be hurt, and honestly, I don’t think Jesus will be either.
When we say no to these invitations – these invitations to disrupt our stories – I don’t think we hurt others, but I do think we rob ourselves of opportunities to experience a whole lot more life, and a whole lot more joy. When we are able to say yes to them, we open ourselves up to a different way of being – one that lets us release our grasp on our lives and dwell in the liberative reality that we are not in control of our world.
Mary Oliver’s poem Don’t Hesitate encourages us to celebrate this kind of joy when it shows up. I leave you with her exhortation: don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
Don’t Hesitate
By Mary Oliver
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.