“Let me go. I am going to help the poor!”
They really wouldn’t let me go. They pulled me to the ground and I was sitting there in the sand with all these kids looking at me, touching me, feeling my legs. One kid looked in my mouth and said, “What a big mouth you have!” They were so excited just being with me, and there I was with my big five-year plan.
“I have to go. I am going to help the poor.”
They were holding me and saying, “Play with us. Don’t you see this is a nice day?”
These little children were telling me that if there is anything worth doing it is right in front of me. Here and now.
“Let’s play ball. Let’s just smile. Let’s just laugh.”
They were laughing, screaming, climbing, and making fun. It was just amazing. They could really celebrate!
The children made me realize that we have to get involved in a reverse mission, a mission from those who suffer in Latin America to us here in North America, so they can show us how suffering and agony are never totally without joy. Laughter and play are Divine healing.
I am not saying that oppression, hunger, and poverty should not be alleviated, but if we are not able to share in children’s joy in the midst of their poverty, what do we really have to give?
Let’s not be so serious as though we are the only ones able to save the world. Only God saves the world. That is something to stay joyful about.
It is hard to talk about joy. I had a professor in Holland who spent three years talking about anxiety. We studied Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus, and a lot of other people who made a career out of writing about anxiety. I asked him, “Can you do a lecture on joy?” He said, “I tried, but I don’t have much to say about it.”
When my leg hurts I can talk about it. I have a lot of words to describe how much it hurts. When it doesn’t hurt I don’t think about it. When I am well I don’t talk about it. My language is limited. My language is much more elaborate for anxiety than for joy. Maybe this says something good about joy. Maybe we experience joy more often than we think. Maybe joyful living is what we are about. Maybe it is so normal that we don’t need to talk about it.
The word I am going to use to talk about joy is ecstasy. It was given to me by Jean Vanier. Jean Vanier is a Canadian who created a worldwide community for and with people with intellectual disabilities. He said that after working with people with disabilities he thought that they of all people had a right to ecstasy. He told me that all people with disabilities should live ecstatic lives.
I started thinking about it, and realized that the word “ecstasy” means to move out (“ec”) of the “static” place. Ecstasy means to move out of that which is static, that which is always the same. The ecstatic life is where we keep moving from a rigidly fixed situation to a new place. We are not content with the old. Joy is that ongoing movement out of the places of death, out of the places where things remain the same and are not moving. Everything in life changes. Where we see life we see change. And as soon as things stop changing, death appears. We become rigid, stiff, dead. It is very important for us to realize that joy is precisely that leaping toward life and moving away from the places that are the same. Joy is always about an experience of life as new.
Joy is connected to newness. No one ever says, “Oh, there is the old joy again.” No! There is old sorrow, but there is no old joy. Joy is always new.
We say, “Wow! Isn’t that exciting?” Newness always hits you as something beautiful, never seen before, something alive. For a little baby, every day is something new. It is never the old child again. It is always growing.
Joy is life because life means something is moving away from the old static places to new dynamic places.
The great challenge is to claim the joy that Jesus offers us. Jesus is God of the living. Jesus came to bring life, and life in abundance. Jesus came to break the chain of wounds and needs and to overcome death. He came to give life, and life is joy. “I want my joy to be yours and for your joy to be complete” (John 15:11). Jesus says, “I came to overcome death and to give you life that does not end.”
It is not easy for us to live this way, because something in us is afraid. There is a resistance to joy. Something in us is tempted to choose death instead of life, to choose the fixed place instead of the place of joy. Fear does this to us. Fear makes us cling to the fixed place. Fear holds us to the ordinary, to the normal, to where we feel secure.
Two things can happen when we are afraid. One is that we stick to the familiar ways of doing things. The other is that we panic and run all over the place. The first is called routine behavior and the other is called rootless behavior. Both involve fear.
Routine Behavior
Think about it. When we get scared we choose familiar patterns, traditional ways. We say, “This is the way I do things here, so don’t come up with new ideas.” “There is nothing new under the sun.” “Let’s just leave things as I have done them.” “You know, I have some experience and therefore I always do it the same way.”
Fear makes people cling to security. Some of us prefer to be secure and a little miserable rather than insecure and vitalized. Some of us hold to our complaints like a security blanket. When asked, “How are you doing?” we respond, “Fine, but I still have my complaints. Don’t think I am all that fine!” We get a strange kind of satisfaction from our complaints.
We talk about people negatively, or about ourselves negatively, or about our health or about whatever. We feel secure because we can hang around places and have something to talk about. We can sit around a table and complain and we feel a little bit safe in our complaints, our nice little gossiping, our nice little “Not good, never will be good, so let’s sit around. This is how things are. Let’s repeat it again.”
We feel a kind of security in not wanting to move. “Let’s just hold on to where we are. We won’t be any better anyhow. Let’s be realistic.”
When we are afraid we keep choosing security. When we become aware of this, examples of choosing security start leaping out at us, not only individual choices for security but also choices made by the collective society to secure itself. We begin to realize that the concern of the world for security is connected with fear.
We build bombs to be secure. We defend ourselves from the enemy. We realize that security concerns make us all dead before the bombs have exploded. They make us stiff and rigid.
Just the fear of war does a lot of destruction—in our children, in our own mind, in our own hearts. It makes us fear for it. It makes us afraid to live and makes us perpetually concerned about our security. We use so much money, time, talent, and energy preparing for a war that might never happen. Nevertheless, it can destroy our minds and hearts and makes us hug the forces of death. This is dangerous.
And there is no joy there.
The more we make security our primary concern the harder it is to be joyful. To be joyful means to jump out of that place of safety and to try something new.
It is a constant discipline to keep moving away from the fearful places and to choose joy. We have to constantly choose between security and freedom, joy and life.
Rootless Behavior
There is another response to fear that is not about security or routine. It is precisely the opposite. It is rootlessness.
Fear not only makes us grab for the safe places, it also makes us just splash around. There are people who get so panicky and so afraid of doing routine things that they go all over the place. They lose their roots, they pull up their anchors. They are just wandering wild and they don’t know what to do. It is like their fear has become so big that they don’t know from one day to the next what they are doing.
They just sort of hang around in the world. They do a little bit here and a little bit there, and they kind of move from one little excitement to the other—sexual excitement, or drinking exci
tement, or drugs excitement, or a quick deal here or a quick deal there, but they are not feeling at home anywhere. They have lost their roots. They wander from here to there.
That is not joy. That is not freedom.
If we don’t have an anchor, we run around anxiously, nervously doing things, but there is no place of home. If we don’t have a sense of at-homeness there is no joy in moving.
Jesus speaks a lot about this. He says, “At the end of the world people are going to run around. There will be debauchery and drunkenness. But don’t follow them. Don’t lose your roots.” “You,” he says, “pray unceasingly and stand with your head erect in the presence of the Son of Man.” Jesus says, “Have a sense of confidence. Remain rooted. Remain connected. Remain in love.”
Fear makes us grab traditional, routine ways of doing things. Or it might be so intense that it throws us for a loop and makes us run around wild. Both types of behavior are not the Christian joy that Jesus speaks about.
Joy
What is joy? What is the real ecstasy?
Let’s look at Jesus for a moment. I don’t know if Jesus was ever funny. I don’t think so. I am not even sure he was happy. But he was filled with joy. The joy of Jesus is a joy that is born out of his ongoing intimacy with God. Joy flows from that communion with the Father. Joy springs from Jesus’ intimate belonging to the Father. Jesus says, “You might leave me. Everybody might forget about me. But the Father will never leave me. The Father is faithful. The Father is with me.”
Try to hear what Jesus is talking about. Jesus is talking about a deep sense of belonging. A deep listening. Obedience means listening with your whole body. Ob-audire in Latin means careful listening. Jesus is the obedient one. He is always listening to the Father. He is always connected to the source from where he comes. He never feels alone. Even when people betray him, even when people nail him to the cross, spit in his face, and flagellate him, he never loses the connection with God. Even when he doesn’t feel it anymore he doesn’t lose it. When he says, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” he doesn’t feel God’s presence, but he knows. He says, “My Father never leaves me alone.” It is there that the joy is anchored. It is anchored in that connection.
Jesus is able to move around in the most difficult situations, not only physically and emotionally, but spiritually. He can explore new ways of loving because he is rooted in God. He breaks right through routines when they become rigid and no longer serve God. He criticizes the Pharisees who were stuck in routines.
Jesus also warns people about living rootless lives. He says, “Remain in me as I remain in you. I love you with the same love that the Father loves me.” He is speaking about the inner connectedness of life. Life-giving connectedness is what allows Jesus to move out of the places of death toward life. The experience of joy that Jesus offers is not happiness. It is not just feeling “up.” Joy is something else. The joy of Jesus is never disconnected from sorrow.
The world is very strange. The world divides our experience of sorrow and joy into two separate emotional states: sadness and happiness. It says, “The world is very sorrowful so we need to have happy moments in between to survive.” Like happy hour. “Let’s create a bit of happiness to forget our sorrow.” The world says, “Life is basically sad, depressing, and sorrowful, but let’s create little islands of happiness.” A lot of commercial products are connected to this. Companies create little toys to make you feel happy for a little moment. But momentary happiness is not what Jesus means when he speaks about joy.
Joy is also not some kind of happy medium between rootlessness and routine. It is not that. Joy is not a momentary vacation from the heaviness of life. Joy is not something to escape the problems of the world. The joy that Jesus offers is of a spiritual order. It is not just an emotional thing. It is not just a physical thing. It is a spiritual gift. The gift of joy.
Joy is a gift that is there even when we are sorrowful, even when we are in pain, even when things are difficult in our lives. The joy that Jesus offers is a joy that exists in very, very difficult situations. I’ve met people who, when I look objectively at their life, make me think, “My good person, how can you live with all this sorrow, all this anguish?” Yet still, there is all this joy there that doesn’t depend on how things are going day after day. There is something deeper. There is a deep connectedness.
What we have to start sensing is that in the spiritual life, joy is embracing sorrow and happiness, pain and pleasure. It is deeper, fuller. It is more. It is something that remains with us. It is something of God that is very profound. It is something we can experience even when we are in touch with very painful things in our lives. If there is anything the church wants to teach us it is that the joy of God can be with us always—in moments of sickness, in moments of health, in moments of success, in moments of failure, in moments of birth, in moments of death. The joy of God is never going to leave us.
We can get a glimpse of it. For instance, if we talk to people who work with the dying, we realize that those people can be very joyful. People who work in hospices and people working in nursing homes face death every day, yet while they are always involved in so-called “sad” situations they are often joyful people. We realize that the joy they have in their hearts is of another nature than just success or failure, birth or death. Sometimes we see people working with the poorest of the poor and when they come to the United States or to a place where there is wealth, they can’t wait to go back to their people again. Why is that? They don’t like misery. They are people who have learned to live with joy that is not taken away from them when they live with the poor. In fact, the suffering brings them in touch with their own joy, which is deeper than the material things we often use as a substitute for true happiness.
We have to realize that in the spiritual life there is something very different going on from what the world teaches us. We are surrounded by voices telling us that we have to have worldly success, but Jesus is saying, “Go with me to where the poor are, to where the broken are, and there you will find joy. Happy are the poor, happy are the mourning, happy are those who are persecuted. Joyful are the poor, those who are making peace, and those who are persecuted.” The whole thing is upside down, because in the eyes of God the joy is hidden right in the center of the sorrow.
Joy is hidden right in the heart of human pain. We can dare to look up at Jesus on the cross, see his execution, and say, “In the cross there is my joy.” We can speak about the cross as a sign of hope because we know that the closer we come to the cross, the closer we come to new life. Somehow the sorrow that we experience is like birth pain. We feel like new life is going to burst out. The agony, pain, and suffering of your life and mine are experienced as ways to give birth to something completely new.
It is precisely by entering more fully and deeply into the reality of our painful existence that we can touch the joy that wants to leap up in us as the child in the womb of Elizabeth leaps up in joy. It doesn’t mean that Elizabeth didn’t have sorrow. It is that she knew that joy was born out of her sorrow. The mystery of life is that Jesus came to suffer with us so that we could be joyful. He didn’t come so we wouldn’t suffer but so that we could taste that eternal life, that lasting joy that is of God, that is already in this world, already now, already precisely here.
When we can face our own painful situation, we will discover that hidden in the pain is the treasure—a joy that is there for us to experience here and now.
It is very important that we get in touch with this. That is what the spiritual life—the life with God—is about. It is being in touch with that love that becomes joy in us. Once we know that place in us, we come in touch with that solid undercurrent that flows underneath all our ups and downs. Underneath all our fluctuations is a deep solid divine stream that is called joy. The love of God that touches us and informs us is a love that we can trust is there. No o
ne can take it away from us. All the great saints talk about it. All people who have suffered talk about it. It is the place that is home. The place of God. The place where you are safe. The place where the world has no power over you. Jesus says, “You do not belong to the world. You belong to God. To me. To the Father. To the Spirit. You are called to live in the world without being of it.”
How Can We Be Joyful? How Can We Bring Joy into Our Lives?
There is one word that is very important to talk about. The word is “celebration.”
Celebration is, first of all, living out of joy. Celebration is what we are called to. We are called to practice joy by celebrating.
We have to learn how to celebrate life. Celebrating life is not a party, but an ongoing awareness that every moment is special and asks to be lifted up and recognized as a blessing from on high. When I was with Jean Vanier and the people with intellectual disabilities, I saw them doing this all the time. The church invites us to celebrate. Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Lent, Pentecost—we celebrate the holy year. We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, we celebrate Thanksgiving, we celebrate memorial days. We celebrate.
But that is only part of celebrating. We have to go further. To celebrate means to lift up the moment and say, “This is God’s moment.” To celebrate is to lift up today and say, “This is the day the Lord has made.” And not just on Thanksgiving but also on Monday morning. Let us be glad and joyful. Let us celebrate! If we are able to celebrate life, and not only on special occasions, we realize that we have many occasions to be glad. We realize that something is happening, that something is coming through, and we have to rejoice.
Following Jesus Page 7