Living in Joy

December 17, 2023
Rev. Rita Capezzi—Unitarian Congregation in Mississauga

Our faith calls us to seek meaning, to embark on a journey of discovery, acknowledging that what we know and where we are today is not the end, it is not the whole story. Our faith calls us to move beyond ourselves as we are in any given moment, because Unitarian Universalism expects us to face the truth of reality. It is a mutilated world, with quite a lot of everything. Sadness and scissors and tenderness and jokes. Ignorance here is hard at work, and nothing is permanent. And as if this was not enough, we spin without a ticket in the carousel of the planets, in the blizzard of galaxies, dancing along out of control. And though it may be a mutilated world, a world broken, filled with damage, it remains also a beautiful world, a world crying out for our attention, longing for us to see alongside the breakage the joy always at the edges of our awareness.

I’ll tell you about a particularly joyful moment from a time when my daughter Helen was about two years old. Now it was a hard time—two parents, two children, two full time jobs, one car, living in a still- new city far from family and friends. I was on child duty in our familial division of labor. Getting the kids to day care and school by 9:00. Hustling down Main Street to be at the college and in the classroom every day by 10:00. Classes, meetings, prep all wedged into those few hours before it was back out to Main Street, to school and day care by 3:30. In order to have enough hours for the work that didn’t fit into that thin sandwich of time, I rose at 4:00 am every day and worked until the kids got up at 7:00 and the whole thing started again, five days a week. I was exhausted in every way possible.

One day when we arrived home, I needed a break, a tad of quiet, maybe a quick nap. And I struggled to figure out how to slot it in. All parents know it is not only unwise to leave a two-year-old and a six-year- old unattended, but it could also be dangerous. I knew my six-year-old could be trusted to play quietly with his toys in the family room. He was that kind of a kid. But not so much the two-year-old. So, I lay down on the couch, and invited little Helen to crawl up onto my chest, and I put a thin flannel blanket over us, over our heads, and I told her that we were playing a new game called “Mommy and Helen Under the Blanket.” She was agreeable, and I was going to close my eyes for a blissful bit of rest before the evening activities commenced.

As she lay on her back, Helen put her right leg up, tenting the blanket, running her foot along our covering. I can’t be sure, but it seems she was simply feeling the material against her skin, enjoying the sensation and the repetition. As she raised her foot high, the late afternoon light brightly shining through the window and through the blanket, her little toes became translucent, glowing a rosy and fleshy red. Perhaps this is something she noticed as well, as transfixed by this lovely vision as I was. With those rosy glowing toes, Helen seemed both completely substantial and wholly ethereal at the same time. Her weight on my chest and her toes aglow, I felt I was in the presence of the holy, the divine mystery of life, that way we are ourselves and more than ourselves at the very same time. That vision that sees the moment and yet beyond the moment. And in that moment, I experienced a joy so great I felt I would burst with it. And I did burst, in a way. As we lay together, watching the sun shine rosy through Helen’s toes, tears ran out of my eyes, down the sides of my head, and right into my ears. That tickled, and I laughed for the joy of it.

As Jacques Lusseyran writes “Joy clarifies everything. How many times have I found myself quite simply walking along. And suddenly I receive one of these gusts of contentment, of, so to say, ‘joy’ or ‘well- being,’ which is a marvelous feeling because one has no idea where it comes from.” He wrote this recognition of a beautiful world from out of the darkness of war and the power of resistence. Though it turns out joy is not as studied as other emotions, neuroscientist Dr. Pamela King, Peter L. Benson Associate Professor of Applied Developmental Science at the School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, she says that three human concerns deeply inform joy and enable it to emerge: “(1) growing in authenticity and living more into one’s strengths, (2) growing in depth of relationships and contributing to others, and (3) living more aligned with one’s ethical and spiritual ideals.” That sounds about right.

Even there, joy is available. I wonder, will you take a moment and reflect on a moment, a feeling of joy in your life. What was it? What was it like to feel it? Write it down if you will, and you can share it with me later, and with each other, if you like.

For many of us, this is a joy-filled time of year. Celebrations, family, gift-giving, lights, and merriment. And this is the time of year our cultures deem that we will, that we must be joyful. Joy is an expectation, one that we may resist or resent or despair over. The music plays incessantly in so many shops and radio stations. The plots of holiday movies follow a familiar path—Joyful it is not, at the beginning, too much strife, but then the track is righted, and all is well. These formulaic films acknowledge that families are not always happy, but even those less-than-perfect families find a way to accept each other as they are, and happiness ensues. This time of year seems to demand a happy ending. It insists upon it. The world of commerce calls us to spend spend spend, and then we will be happy happy happy. Won’t we?

There’s not a thing wrong with this sentiment, except that it doesn’t ring true enough. This narrative is not the whole truth. It’s just one script about human relationships that tries to overwrite much of the world’s reality. You recognize that reality, too, a reality filled with war and homelessness and hunger and degradation. How we long, perhaps more at this time of year than at any other, for more hope and less despair, for more happy hearts and fewer hungry mouths, for more connection and less isolation, for less consumption and more compassion, for a brave love that quells hate and violence. How we long for truth and justice and the end of oppressions of all kinds. How we long for the courage to be the Beloved Community to which we aspire. The world is full of pain and challenge, it seems so fragile and so broken, so mutilated from the glorious garden Mother Earth might be.

And for me, perhaps for some of you as well, joy can become elusive on a day like today. On this day three years ago, right about this time as a matter of fact, my father was dying a thousand miles away from where I sat in a Zoom meeting. As inevitable as his death was, as all our deaths are for that is a reality of our human beingness, his death was also devastating for me and for my family. I trust you understand what I mean.

I wonder, will you take a moment and reflect on a moment, a time when it was challenging to find joy in your life. What was it? What was it like to feel it? And what could you do to return to joy alongside pain? Write it down if you will, and you can share it with me later, and with each other, if you like.

We all of us face the challenges of daily living—tough jobs, troubles with children or parents, needs that go unmet, fragile finances or living arrangements, illness and anxiety and fear. We all face the deaths of those we love. All of this is true, all of this individual challenge held in the frame of the challenges of the larger world, over which we have so little control. We may feel guilty about being joyful when the world is falling apart. We may feel overwhelmed by the grief in the world and unable to credit our own happiness. All of this is true, and there is other truth as well—in the words of 18 th -century poet and mystic William Blake, joy and woe are woven fine. The fabric of reality is not made from one or the other. Rather, the fabric of reality is closely knit of both, one inseparable from the other. The weave of reality falls apart if one tries to separate the warp from the weft. The knitted stiches are locked in place by each other, the whole falls to pieces if the locks are broken. Joy and woe are woven fine. This is what reality looks like. The Sufi mystic Rumi wrote, “The hurt you embrace becomes joy.” Rumi wrote, “Joy lives concealed in grief.”

These states, joy and sorrow, they are woven so closely, they are knit so absolutely that the fabric cannot be made of only one thing or the other. And science bears this out. According to Dr. Pamela King, “joy and sorrow are deeply connected. Both are a response to those things that matter most,” and to how we grow in awareness of each to help us become as human beings. The challenge of life and the beauty of life reside tight to each other. We face reality, and live well, when we invite the pattern, when we see that we cannot have joy without the challenge as well, and that we can embrace both.

Out of all the frustration, the dull round of ordinary life grinding on me a little each day, out of psychic pain and overwhelming difficulty arose a moment of pure and surprising joy. And it was a joy shared, a vision I will never forget and one I choose to bring to mind, especially in times of despair, those rosy toes and Helen’s embodied beauty a continuing joy. Once more the gift was given, wonder filling the moment, opening my weary heart. I felt filled with light, and lighter by far than I had felt for days. A powerful, broadening sensation arose in my body, vibrating through me, infusing me with a wholeness resonant throughout the whole of my being. The gift was given, and I didn’t know then what I know now: that the gift is always given, always present, if I am looking for it. If I am tuning myself to hear it. If I am peaceful and hopeful and loving, joy enters. It might be fleeting, and yet joy comes.

My father’s death is both completely individual and entirely common. And thanks be for that, since the very ordinariness of the deaths of those we love enables us to understand each other and care for each other. Beyond grief and guilt, within sorrow and pain we find our capacity to connect to each other, to care about each other. And in that sharing, there are clear moments of joy and grace, blessings. And we are called to praise them.

Maybe we can try to create a bit of joy together, right now. It won’t solve any of the Congregation’s troubles, but it may bring us together for a moment of lightness and connection. Let’s start by humming together. Can we hum together? How about we stomp our feet together? How about we clap together? Clap louder. Can you? How about we shout together. Let’s make a joyful noise together, for each other, with each other.

Joy is a state of mind and of the spirit. An abiding sense of goodness that persists beyond suffering and pain, even beyond happiness. It is the resilience that enables us to endure all the wrong and evil of the world that we can’t help but can’t help but witness. And it is the deep connection we feel within and with our bodies, connection to ourselves as whole and to others as whole. Such is life. Joy residing with pain, knit together, woven fine. In the delights of friendship. In this sacred space of community and reverence for the mysteries of life. May we be and may we remain joyful as a people, deepening, nurturing, acting for good. May it ever be our way.

Psychology Today: What Is Joy and What Does It Say About Us?