SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE TO PERSONAL GROWTH “Develop a Practice of Joy”
My challenge to you this month is to cultivate a practice of Joy. Joy, like hope, can be understood as a practice like meditation or yoga or journaling. It’s something you can work at and develop. It’s not just something you experience, it’s an attitude you bring to everything you do. This month, I challenge you to find ways to improve your practice of joy. Over the next month, see if you can do a little better at noticing love, light, meaning, symbol, and things that lift your heart. Maybe take some time at the beginning or end of each day to remind yourself to look for the joy or remember what joy you might have passed over too quickly.
Joy is often confused with being an expression of extreme, ultimate happiness. Joy and happiness are not the same thing. Happiness is an emotion, while joy is a state of heart; a condition of the soul. Joy amplifies happiness, certainly, but joy can also be present amid sadness and pain and loss. The opposite of joy isn’t sadness, but emptiness and isolation.
Joy is one of the foundational themes of liberal religion. It is intertwined with faith, hope, and love. Joy is often used as a single word descriptive of one of the five smooth stones of liberal religion. James Luther Adams writes, “Liberalism holds that the resources (divine and human) available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate (if not immediate) optimism.” This is a cause for joy; a reason to look for and see what is possible; a reason to trust in ourselves, each other, and the universe around us.”
Joy is a fullness of heart that experiences a deep connection to the divine, the ground of all being, source, spirit, the universe, your higher power, love – however you want to think of it. Joy is wonder and amazement at the miracle of existence. Joy is love and being loved. Joy is seeing and being seen. When we experience joy, it is usually accompanied by pleasure, happiness, excitement and elation, for this is when we most easily recognize it. However, it is when joy breaks through as a small light in the darkness, that perhaps teaches us its most profound lesson and its true nature.
The day of my father’s funeral, I had an experience of joy. His memorial service was at an apple orchard. I read Robert Frost’s poem “After Apple Picking.” When we left the orchard for the cemetery, I gazed out over the apple trees and was unexpectedly caught up in the beauty of the orchard. It was a sunny October day and after apple picking so most of the fruit, but not all, had been picked or fallen to the ground. The sun on the grass, the apple tree branches, and the horizon of rolling hills produced a feeling of wonder and awe, and for a moment, in the company of family and friends, I felt ultimately connected to this world and to the circle of life – and death. It was a moment full of love. It was a moment of joy in the middle of a sad and difficult day. I was able to find this moment because of my practice of looking for love, light, meaning, symbol, and things that lift my heart. My practice of joy enabled me to experience a moment of joy I might otherwise have missed.