My Way

I wrote last Friday that I was going to think this Friday about happiness and joy. I also wrote that while I didn’t think they were the same, I wasn’t convinced that one was qualitatively better than the other.

Since then, Julie has written about “wearing joy” for Eastertide. And she has drawn this distinction: Happiness has to do with feelings or emotions. Joy is deeper. So, “we can know joy even when we are unhappy . . . .” Joy is also a gift, “not something we can acquire or even aim for.” Indeed, it may well come, by God’s grace, when we are looking the other way. Thus, we are “surprised by joy!”

Moreover, joy lasts. The gift of it, which is from God, is “abiding.” Paraphrasing Romans 8, Julie says, “Nothing can separate us from joy,” though we need to pay attention—even when we are looking the other way—in order to discern the constant “joy and presence of God” with us.

Wendy Farley also distinguishes joy and happiness—or, at least, joy and pleasure—though she doesn’t think our “problem” with regard to joy is only inattentiveness. (This is in The Wounding and Healing of Desire.) Farley thinks we resist joy, because it is not easy; it may even be dangerous. At least, we perceive it to be. “Pleasure is easy. We do not have to dedicate much energy to the capacity for pleasure. We do not have to do anything special to taste the deliciousness of chocolate cake. We only have to put it in our mouth. But joy moves into the deepest parts of us. It is like a ferocious, tender lover who adores us so intensely that it will not be satisfied until every corner of our body and soul has been drenched with delight. Joy requires the strength to receive joy.”

But is God a ferocious, tender lover? The phrase reminds me of the first line of Emily Dickinson’s poem

God is a distant—stately Lover—
Woos, as He states us—by His Son—
Verily, a Vicarious Courtship—
“Miles”, and “Priscilla", ”were such an One—

But, lest the Soul—like fair “Priscilla”
Choose the Envoy—and spurn the Groom—
Vouches, with hyperbolic archness
“Miles”, and “John Alden" ”were Synonym—

Here’s what I think—just to start an argument. I think Julie is right, but. I almost have to say she is right, because she says (very well) what I have always heard—and believed—particularly that joy like grace is a gift from God, and so it abides. We persevere in it, not by our own perseverance, but because as a gift of God, it can’t be taken away from us. Joy claims us.

But, we also claim joy. By that I mean we tend to pay attention to joy, to talk about it, precisely when we are unhappy, because we’re unhappy and we know we oughtn’t to be. If we truly believe what we say we believe—that God so loves us that in Christ he has redeemed us for all time—then we have no reason to be unhappy. Any of the time. (So why are we?)

Still for the sake of argument: Wendy Farley is wrong on several counts. First, she undersells pleasure, though I agree with her about chocolate cake, it’s no more than frisson. But apparently, she hasn’t been drinking good wine; she hasn’t been reading Emily Dickinson; she hasn’t been listening to Stan Getz; she hasn’t been looking out my fogged-up bathroom window across the roofs of the Deaf School and into the Blue Ridge.

So, she suggests that God must be ferocious to bring joy. It’s an interesting image, joy as ravisher. It’s an effective image as well, if we’re not happy. God comes to dispel—to rip away—not only the clouds of unknowing—as if that weren’t enough—but also the fog of our self-absorbed woe, so he may rapture us.

Does he? I’m not so sure. I find God incredibly patient with human self-absorption and unhappiness, our melodramatic melancholy, that stupid certainty we have most days that you-know-this-is-just-a-pretty-crappy-life-a-good-Merlot-Emily-Dickinson-Stan-Getz-and-the-Blue-Ridge-Mountains-not-to-mention-the-whole-salvation-and-eternal-life-thing-notwithstanding. But that’s my experience.

And it’s only my experience. There’s no reason God couldn’t also be ferociously, kick-butt impatient. Or, in other circumstances, a “distant—stately Lover—“ albeit with a trick up his sleeve. (Or maybe two: don’t forget the Spirit.)

Frankly, I don’t know why we’re unhappy, but I suspect that sometimes it’s because we are unable—or unwilling—to experience a full range of pleasure. We write our own experience large; then, we become trapped in it. We become so convinced that God works in certain ways, our ways, that we cannot see—or hear or taste or touch or smell—that he’s working in others as well.

- Rick