Chapter 1

What is Joy?

May your streets be filled with dancing;
May your homes be filled with joy.

What does it mean to have JOY? What is it, this joy?

Joy comes from Latin (gaudire) and Old French (joie) words. That doesn’t tell us much about the word, except that the idea has been around for a long time.

It has different origins, however, from the word “happy”, which started out life meaning “lucky” or “chance”. Do you remember the old-fashioned expressions, “a happy chance” or a “happy shot”, or “I happened upon (encountered) a little stream”. “Happy” gives us words such as “perhaps”, “mayhap”, even the verb, “happen”, which all have to do with uncertainties, remote but fortunate chances.

When we say we are happy, we refer generally to short-lived emotions. “There are you happy now?!” we say to someone when we are giving in to something that we had been arguing about. “Happy Birthday”, we sing, not really intending to wish someone lifelong joy, but a pleasant interlude in the middle of an otherwise ordinary normality.

Joy is definitely not something that is left to chance. It is a definite emotion that we all know to some extent. It is more than mere happiness; it is that deep feeling of bubbling-over exuberance that just can’t be kept down. You know you have it when you find yourself whistling in the shower or in the lift; when you suddenly realise that you have been walking along with a smile on your lips, just because of what you have been thinking about. Sometimes you find yourself hugging your partner, or holding their hand tighter and giving their hand a squeeze as you snuggle in to the warmth of joyful companionship.

If you can’t remember what any of these are like, then your life has been seriously missing joy for a long time. Watch out, because depression may be just around the corner. Seek out joy. It can be elusive, but it does not lurk, unfindable, at the rainbow’s end, always bound to disappoint. It is capable of being discovered. But it more than likely won’t be found amongst goods and things and stuff you can buy with money. It will be found amongst people, with God, in relationships, because that is part of how we are made.

Although most of the old religious artworks, and many church services, and many bishops and ministers don’t really show it up very well, joy is supposed to be the absolute centre of Christianity. Joy was what came into the world when Jesus was born. “Joy to the world!”, we sing at Christmas time. If Jesus came to bring anything, it was to turn our sorrow into singing, our mourning into dancing, our sackcloth and ashes into party gear and cheerful music.

Joy is what you feel when you are in love. “You’re the cat’s meow!” sings the lovelorn dancer.

I’m singin’ in the rain, just singin’ in the rain.
What a glorious feeling; I’m happy again.
I’m laughin’ at clouds so dark up above,
The sun’s in my heart, and I’m ready for love.

Joy is what you feel when you're not just in love, but when you know you are loved. Knowing you are loved is one of the things in life that are essential to deep happiness.

Get a copy of the children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, and make sure your children read it often. I have a Little Golden Book version, which sits on my bookshelf amongst philosophers and theologians and other thick books. Here’s an extract from it. It is a dialogue between a toy rabbit in the playroom and an old toy skin horse:

“What is REAL?” asked rabbit one day. “Does it mean having things buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“REAL isn't how you are made,” said the skin horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child really loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become REAL.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the skin horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, or bit by bit?” The rabbit sounded worried.
“It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time – that’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Joy is what you feel when you know that God is not angry with you, that you have not completely blown it in regards to him and his love. When you know that there is a pathway back to being right with him, and you are on it.

It is very difficult for us as beings created by God, to live our lives totally out of the orbit of his presence. We kid ourselves that we can do it; that he doesn’t exist, that it doesn’t matter if he does; that we’re doing OK, and he’ll be cool with that… But deep down we know that he is different and otherly and that we can’t make it without him. The more we ignore him, the more we try to make it all right by giving him a nod at Easter and Christmas, the more we slide into despair, that suffocating opposite of joy.

We know joy in that moment when we meet with him, and we hear his voice, saying, “It’s all right. I love you. I have forgiven you. It’s all right. You are my treasure and I will hold you to myself when the storm comes. You will be safe with me, because I am strong, and good, and pure and eternal. Just sit here with me, and snuggle up a while.”

The opposite of joy is not sadness. It is despair.

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Sadness is the opposite of happiness. Sadness lasts but briefly. We are sad when we lose a soccer match, when we lose a little bit of money, when we don’t get the job we hoped to get, when we lose a loved one, when the ride ends and we have to get off, when the holiday finishes and we have to go back to work or school. That’s sadness. It’s fairly temporary. Sadness usually has easy solutions, to get us back to feeling good in ourselves again.

But despair is deeper than sadness. Despair is what strikes us deep in our hearts and minds. When it is too much to get out of bed in the morning, or, worse, when we lie awake in the night, having awoken in a hot sweat, in mad panicked thought about our current situation. When we know that the world is in fact blacker than it looks. When we tell ourselves that it can only get better and we know we are lying to ourselves. When the blackness spreads from our mind and heart deep into our very soul, and we know that we are lost. Lost and totally undone, with no hope of help.¹

Joy appears as a butterfly on a Spring day, after such bouts of bitterness and horrors of the mind. Joy inspires us to reach out to the eternal in the universe and cry out aloud that we are grateful, thankful just to be alive. And to have hope again.

This is why joy’s opposite is despair; because joy is a deep emotion, not superficial. Joy lives deep down inside my belly. Its source is not immediately recognisable, like a new car or holiday that makes us momentarily happy. This is why Jesus promised “Whoever believes in me, streams of living water will flow from within him.”

Joy surprises ² us by taking us over in billows of peace and thankfulness that we are alive. When we try to examine ourselves for a moment, when we pin the butterfly out on the board and try to examine its parts, we can see the delicate tracery of colour and transparent filaments but we cannot see its lilting, lolloping flight, as it floats from flower to flower.

Sometimes we can say that we are deeply joyful because of my wife or husband or family or where I live, or the weather, or some such general thing. But we generally cannot analyse the full depths of our joy as it alights on the different parts of our mind, soul, spirit and (finally, in physical exuberance) our body, lighting each one up as through we were kids at a party playing with sparklers.

Joy is the lilt in our voice, the spring in our step, the flash in our eyes, the rich moment of knowing that I am loved by someone other, that I am loved by God, that the Great Trouble is over, for now, and I am delivered. This storm has passed, and for a time I live without fear, and in the comfort of my own peace. My home is now not under beleaguering threat. My safety is now secure and I have a place to stand. Faith is the foundation of joy.

“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning”. (Psalm 30:5)

The whole of Psalm 30 is a wonderful chapter on the joy that comes from having a right relationship with God.

In the following chapters, you will find many Reasons for Joy. These are given so that you might know joy.

So that, if you have lost it, or abandoned it, or allowed it to be squeezed out of your life, you may know that it is still here.
Available.
Waiting.
Ready to be picked up and tossed on again, like a favourite coat, in which you not only feel comfortable, but strong enough to face the world, invincible and significant, in yourself – not because of your human self-talk, but because your self has been re-connected with your Creator. This is the only firm foundation for knowing deep and permanent Joy.

Read these reasons for joy, and allow yourself to be glad.

Family JoyFinder

Sit down together as a family and ask everyone to rate the family’s “happiness” factor.

• How joyful are we as a family?
• Who often feels happy just to be a part of this family
• Does anyone sometimes wish that we would do something that would bring some light-heartedness to our life together?

Parents ask yourselves these questions, and if you feel capable of it, share your answers with your husband or wife…

• Do I often (or occasionally) just sit back and reflect on how I am at peace with life?
• What is there about our family that makes me feel a sense of deep gratefulness, even if I don’t know who I should be grateful to?
• How long is it since I felt a kind of exuberant joy welling up inside me?

If any of the answers to these questions make you think that you may be missing out on some joy, then do some stocktaking now.

• How could you change things?
• Do you know how to?
• Perhaps it is time to seek some discussion with someone else who might be able to help?
• Try reading Psalm 30 together as a family. Make it your goal to be able to identify with this psalm.

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1 G. M. Hopkins the poet, wrote:
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.

2 To understand the use of the word “surprise” here, think about the joke told about the American dictionary-maker, Mr Webster, who compiled Webster’s dictionary. One day he was in his study and his secretary was sitting on his knee. The door opened and in walked his wife. “Mr Webster!” she exclaimed.
“I am surprised!”
“No,” replied an embarrassed but correct Webster. “I am surprised. You are astonished.”
Joy often surprises us by creeping up on us unawares. All of a sudden we know we are deeply happy and at peace, and we don’t really know why.