Suppose your spiritual life was a basketball team. Who would be your starting five?
CLICK on any of the five below.

1. LOVE
2. WONDER
3. GRATEFULNESS
4. COMPASSION
5. JOY

   There is only one real blasphemy:
the refusal of joy. ~ Paul Rudnick

Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy
meets the world’s greatest need.
Frederick Buechner

I know no one who has embraced a love ethic whose life
has not become joyous and more fulfilling.
The widespread assumption that ethical behavior
takes the fun out of life is false.
~ bell hooks, All about Love: New Visions

The fifth and final player to round out the starting five on my DREAM TEAM for an authentic spirituality is JOY.

We live in a time that is increasingly lacking in joy, a world that is starving for genuine, deep-seated and far-reaching efflorescent joy. Part of this is due to the fact that with contemporary communication technology and enhanced means of transportation creating a global village, we simply have access to more information. And much—and at times it feels like most—of that information is so disturbing, disheartening, and overwhelming that it can be hard to get out of bed in the morning, let alone to rise and “look on the bright side of life.” In addition, when we do feel joy in our life, family, friendships, or good fortune, it is easy to feel a tinge or two of guilt when we are aware of global atrocities and local tragedies and personally know others who are experiencing trials and tribulations.

I suspect there is more going on. That joy today is often either A.W.O.L. or difficult to pull off suggests to me a soul sickness. Sadly, joy is one message we can proclaim without having to worry about preaching to the choir. It’s not a song many seem to know by heart. Of all the arguments in Nietzsche’s searing attack on Christianity perhaps the words that should still make us wince is his observation and assertion that Christians are a rather joyless lot. Zap! Pow! Zing! This is a challenge to Christians who too often look and act like we’ve been sucking on lemons all day. Who could blame God for enjoying being with the joyful more than the joyless? This criticism is especially barbed given that in his letter to the Galatians, the apostle Paul lists joy as one of the gifts of the Spirit. But whereas the gift is free and freely given, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t come as an outgrowth of how we live. Writer, pastor, and theologian Eugene Peterson reminds us, “Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence.” It’s the gift that comes inside the cereal box of right action, that is, within a Christ-like life of love, wonder, gratefulness, and compassion.

We must be brave enough to do some soul searching or some searching for soul both personally and as a religious community or civic collectivity: why the shortage of joy? What’s the problem with supply when the demand is so great? We could blame the scarcity on circumstance: the weather or Putin or an ulcer or The Donald or COVID or the relentless acts of racism or sexism or mask mandates or our mother-in-law or the Supreme Court or Vitamin D deficiency or the Senate or low tide or Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), but despite those all too real realities, the truth is we—at least self-identifying Christians—are obliged to be joyful. After all, it’s in the red print, not the fine print.1

For a Christian, joy is a perspective on life rooted in the conviction that our existence is neither an accident nor a given, but a gift that presumes a giver. As a gift, our life came to us unsolicited, undeserved, unearned, and unrehearsed. To become human—not to mention holy—is evermore to be the grateful recipient of the incomprehensible surprise of being and the life that comes forth from and signifies the gratuitousness of Divine love. Rabbi Heschel wrote, “Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.” It is this humble perspective and reverent understanding of life that explains why joy makes sense. Joy is not somewhere out there depending on chance and circumstance. Joy is the echo of God’s life in us. Joy—the connoisseurs of cliché and the makers of dorm room posters would have us know—is an inside job. And it is.

French philosopher and writer Leon Bloy wrote, “Joy is the most undeniable sign of the presence of God.” I believe that holds true whether the joyful person believes in God or not. Incidentally, there are few friends in life more valuable than a friend who is extremely prone to joy. Joy is a sacrament through which God shows up in the world. The question is are we the sacraments of joy?

If we are full of joy does that mean we are giddy, constantly laughing, never sad, perennially optimistic, never angry or down, always feeling high, ecstatic?  No. It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s not all or nothing, one or the other—agony or ecstasy, sorrow or joy, grief or praise. As was the case with gratefulness, a distinction is in order. Of course, we are not to take joy in the violence, exploitation, corporate greed, oppressive poverty, or suffering of innocents to offer only an abridged list of the affliction and agony running rampant in the world in 2022. But we are nonetheless—or perhaps I should say, all the more—called to be joyful people despite the circumstances. We are summoned to be agents of joy because of the circumstances. When asked why he convened Vatican II St. Pope John XXIII replied: “To make the human sojourn on earth less sad.”

Like wonder, gratefulness, and compassion, joy is intimately, and I would argue, necessarily linked to love. I don’t believe one can experience deep, ongoing joy apart from the experience of being loved and loving. John of the Cross said “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love”—or draw love out. And wherever there is love, joy is possible. That’s the kicker, the secret sauce. The challenge, then, given the endless suffering in the world, is not to look away from or ignore altogether the anguish present in our world, country, neighborhoods, and families, but instead is somehow to bring love into these situations. Only then does joy have a clear path into our everyday lives.

I believe that joy is the beneficiary of each of the other four players on my DREAM TEAM. To mix my metaphors, joy is the fruit of the other four qualities and modes of being. That joy is the natural follow-through of love, wonder, and gratefulness might not be hard to conceive, but I suspect it is more difficult to imagine that it also is a consequence of compassion. Remember, compassion is the incarnation of love wherever there is hurt in the world that we are willing to pull up close to and share with another.

The paradox of not merely feeling compassion but enacting it in one’s daily life as a conscious and intentional practice is that it avails us of joy. By virtue of the fact that one is especially sensitive to the suffering of others, compassionate people tend to be more aware of and appreciative of the gratuitous boon and beauty of being alive that expresses itself as joy.  Compassionate people are more joyful people. Joy is what it is because sorrow is what it is.

The up-close and personal experience of the sorrowful mysteries of life does have the capacity to pull us down, distress or depress us, and to dog us with despair. But, whatever the day, whatever the weather, whatever our given situation, when we commit each day to look at life through the lenses of love, wonder, and gratefulness, as well as compassion, the woes and heartaches of life have the surprising capacity to accentuate the little and large joys of being alive that are tucked into our days like folded prayers slid into cracks on the wailing wall.

I find that in the autumn (winter?) of my life, the player on the DREAM TEAM I most want to emulate in my life is joy. My Irish heritage has passed onto me like mother’s milk a great familiarity with, if not proclivity for, the blessed tension of melancholy and mirth. Knowing that there are far fewer days in front of my nose than behind my head, I’d like the scale to tip more toward a mirth that morphs into sheer joy. It is joy that I desire to become proficient at in my later years. And because joy—no less than love, wonder, gratefulness, and compassion—is a practice, a deliberate mode of being, a way of engaging life and encountering one another, it is possible not only to cultivate but to harvest joy.

The earth—and our life on it—would be a healthier, happier, and more humane home if we began to see joy not just as an emotion or feeling but more as a summons from life itself, a daily, deliberate, and perpetual practice we make in our lives with the help of the Spirit—the true bringer of joy. Our graced task each day is not merely to feel joyful but rather to be joyful. Like moods, feelings are fickle. We don’t step out into our day hoping and wishing and praying to happen upon someone or something that might make us feel joyful. If and when it does—great. Be joyful.

But this approach appears to excuse us from our response-ability to be joyful and puts the onus of joy on the wow factor of something outside us. Viewing joy, let alone life, as a crap shoot guarantees life will feel like a roller coaster ride and is not a sustaining way of living healthily, happily, and hopefully. In reality, there is no telling what will evoke joy in us. Novelist and author of theological works Frederick Buechner insists, “Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes.”

True confessions—if I were to preach on joy, I’d have to bi-locate since I’d be sitting in the front pew, not just standing behind the pulpit. I’d be the first to hear it. But this is neither a homily nor a sermon. It’s a catalyst for reflection and a conversation starter. If it were a homily I’d justify it by saying this is what I know to be true about joy based on our sacred texts, the teachings of the sages, and what I have found to be true based on my life experience, even if I’m a mediocre example of it. So let’s talk: I went first, now it’s your turn to reflect and respond. What sayeth thee?

P.S. A starting five does not a complete team make, nor a complete spiritual life. So over time, I will fill out the rest of my roster for a mature, integral spirituality.

1 The Red-Letter Bible highlights in red font all the things that Jesus said and taught.

MUSIC: Bruce Cockburn, Joy Will Find a Way

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