The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  The Meaning of Joy

  Mr. Justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography that you may not be able to define it but you know it when you see it. Of joy we might be able to say the same thing. Most of us could not give a definition that would pass muster, but we have all had moments of joy and we know them for what they are when we have them. We remember the occasions of such feelings, not because we are such acute students of observation but because such occasions, despite the commands to be joyful, are remarkably rare. For that reason they stand out from the bulk of our experience and we cherish them, even as they nourish us. The Yankees, among whom I was brought up, used to say that firewood warms twice: first when it is chopped, and then when it is burned. So too is it with joy, in experience and in recollection.

  I was a young man on my way to receiving a premature dignity, and in the company of an old man, a dear friend and a great poet. When in 1974 I was about to be appointed to the post I now hold, the Plummer Professorship of Christian Morals at Harvard, I was thirty-two years old, and it was thought by some that I needed more gravitas, or “bottom,” as the English say, if I was convincingly to fill this venerable post and be taken seriously by both students and faculty. My old friend, the poet and consummate Harvard man, David Thompson Watson McCord, decided to take the matter in hand and to push things along. He was a member of the Class of 1921, and in 1974 was a spritely seventy-seven years old. Out of the blue, or so it seemed, I was offered an honorary degree, a doctorate in divinity, the D.D., long known to the clergy as Donated Dignity. This generous offer came from a small college in New Hampshire, New England College, which had earlier honored McCord and with which he had had a long and helpful association. I was thrilled at the prospect, such vanities having long meant much to me, and so McCord and I undertook to drive to the college for the Commencement. It was the Memorial Day weekend, and New England was in its glory.

  A ride anywhere with David McCord was always an adventure, with the conversation as stimulating as the driving was erratic. We always took the byways and back roads, avoiding going anywhere in a straight line or anywhere that could be reached by more than four paved lanes. This ride was no exception, and as we made our way through the New Hampshire countryside, I filled with anticipation and the poet with recollection, we decided to take a detour that would bring us into the lovely grounds of St. Paul’s School, on the perimeter of Concord. As we approached the school we could tell that something was on: Japanese lanterns were strung across the paths, and cars lined the drives. Young people and parents were strolling across the lush grass; it was just before dusk, and in that peculiarly haunting light one could see excitement. We had arrived on the eve of their Prize Day, and no one noticed us. St. Paul’s chapel is one of the loveliest nineteenth-century Gothic structures in America, a gem of perpendicular beside the river and against the hills. We went in. It was empty, save for someone playing the organ. Light streamed in through the stained-glass windows, glancing off the brass fittings on the altar and the marble plaques to the dead—the great, the good, and the young.

  It was all stillness inside even though we could hear the murmur of young voices on the outside, and as we walked among the memorials, I, at least, thought of the intimate proximity between the living and the dead in that space when it was occupied under compulsion by the present inhabitants of the school. We moved about in the same place, together but alone, at our own pace and without comment. We were there for quite a while—in fact, the organist had long finished and gone—and as we emerged we discovered that it was now night, the sun had gone, the Japanese lanterns were ablaze, and the chapel glowed from inside, its windows giving lovely color to the early darkness. For some time we did not speak, for we were both in tears. Later, I learned from David that he had found a tablet to an old friend he had known in college, a St. Paul’s boy who had died early and was commemorated in his old school chapel. I was overcome not by an experience of recollection, for I knew no one there, but by emotions so focused and powerful that they frightened and delighted me at the same time. I do not know what the experience was, but whatever it was neither David nor I wished to ruin it by an explanation, and so we drove on into the night in sympathetic silence. It was a moment of joy, the “feeling of satisfaction and fullness of well-being.”

  That was now nearly a quarter of a century ago, and there have been many happy moments, even joyful ones, since then, but that one experience stands out in my heart’s memory. Dear David McCord is now nearly one hundred years old and resident in a nursing home. When I see him and conversation flags for a even a moment, he will say to me, “Remember that evening in St. Paul’s Chapel?” and our eyes fill with tears and we hold hands in silence. I take some pleasure, selfishly, I admit, that this memory of joy, still vivid in his imagination after all these years and in all of his years, was one that I shared with him.

  Was this a religious experience? The question itself is almost vulgar, impertinent, filled with the implied suspicion that a religious experience must have an angel visitant, a falling down on one’s knees, and a doctrinally correct conversation with God readily reportable to others who can verify the legitimacy of the experience. Who knows? I do know, however, that the Bible is filled with accounts of such encounters. When Jacob, for example, no sentimentalist and not given to holy work, had his dream at Bethel of the angels ascending and descending a ladder from heaven to earth, and got his promise in the bargain, he awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” Then, recognizing that he was at a thin place between two realms, each of which he had now experienced, he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:16–17)

  I consulted my colleague Charles Dunn, now retired, and long expert in the field of Celtic folklore and mythology, and asked him about thin places. He told me that mountains and rivers were particularly favored as such places, marking as invariably they do the horizontal and perpendicular frontiers; religious experiences are very likely to occur in such places. Two vivid biblical instances come to mind. The first is the experience of the prophet Elijah on Mount Horeb, as recounted in I Kings 19, when the prophet is on the run from Queen Jezebel, who has put a price on his head for the slaughter of her priests of Baal. He is at his lowest moment. Depressed, literally, he takes refuge in a cave or depression on the side of Mount Horeb, and there before his eyes God the Lord passed by. There was a great and mighty wind that broke the mountain in pieces, “… but the Lord was not in the wind.” Then there was an earthquake, and after that a fire, but the Lord was not in any of these phenomena of nature. He is described as appearing after the fire, a “still, small voice.” (I Kings 19:9–12)

  That “still, small voice” has always intrigued preachers and commentators. It is clear that the writer of Kings wishes to contrast the noise and power of nature, with its capacity to terrorize and intimidate, with the real power of the Lord, which is displayed in a quite unexpected, unanticipated way. Nature intimidates but God empowers; that is the burden of I Kings 19. That “still, small voice” doesn’t mean a little whisper, or a tiny voice, nor does it mean silence as we understand silence. For years I have tried to figure out just what it does mean, and it finally occurred to me at a concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was a Good Friday performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, with Jessye Norman singing. By every measure it was an extraordinary performance and experience, and as the last note ended, there was in that vast hall an incredible silence, and then the place erupted into thunderous applause. It came to me that the silence at the end of the concert was not merely the absence of sound but something more than that. It was an expectant, pregnant silence, nearly overpowering in its effect, so much so, so unbearable, that applause was more than approbation, it was essential psychic relief. That, I think, was what Elijah’s “still, small voice” was about, not at all something modest or whisper
y but something grand, intimate, and portentous all at once.

  If Elijah had his moment on the mountain, Jesus, we are told, had his in the river at his baptism. All four of the gospels give an account of the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan at the hands of John the Baptist, and all of these baptismal accounts mark a transition from one aspect of the life of Jesus to another. His ministry begins with the baptism. Matthew says,

  And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him; and lo, a voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:16–17)

  For Christians, life begins not with the natural birth to which all flesh is heir, but with the second birth, of which baptism is the sign. Baptism is not only the sign of the new life, a new identity that calls for a new name—the custom of the baptismal name—but it confers new life as well. It initiates one into a new order of being, whose destiny is not death, the end of the natural order, but new life in which one lives in the world but is not of the world. Baptism seals Christians as essentially foreign and outsiders to the place in which they live, aliens and strangers, not natives but transients, tourists even, for as Paul notes in Philippians 3:20, “our citizenship”—or “commonwealth,” as the Revised Standard Version puts it—“is in heaven.”

  This notion of baptism as initiation into a foreign, even alien, realm, making of the baptized resident an “alien,” in the provocative language of immigration appropriated by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon in the title of their book of the same name, may well seem strange and alarming to the many who dutifully have their children “done” as a mark of respectable membership in the prevailing culture. Baptism is not standing at the border of one realm and looking across at the other side; it is a renunciation of the citizenship into which we are born. It is a rejection of all that we understand to be real and powerful. It is not “joining the church,” as so many institutionally minded Christians mistakenly think; it is taking out citizenship papers in another place, as opposite and far distant from this place as can be imagined. This is given vivid expression in Hebrews, which, in speaking of those who died in faith as “strangers and exiles on the earth,” says of them,

  For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland, If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. (Hebrews 11:13–16)

  Twice now I have had the privilege of presiding at public ceremonies of the naturalization of new American citizens. These ceremonies were held in Plymouth, Massachusetts, as part of the Federal District Court’s happy custom of swearing in new citizens at places of great historic significance. In Plymouth both of the ceremonies were under the auspices of the Pilgrim Society, of which I was president. At the spiritual shrine of American immigration, Plymouth Rock, I watched in August 1995, when on the occasion of the 375th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Mr. Justice David Souter of the United States Supreme Court administered the oath to one hundred and two new citizens. In that oath the citizens were required to give up any allegiance they may have to the lands of their birth, and one of these new citizens, an Englishman and an old friend of mine, said that the hardest part for him was the public renunciation of his allegiance to foreign potentates and sovereigns, in his case, to Queen Elizabeth II. He did so, however, for that was the only way he could become a citizen of this new country.

  I had seen such a forswearing before: in the baptismal service in the Book of Common Prayer where the persons to be baptized, or their sponsors, are asked, “Dost thou renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them?” The person to be baptized, or the sponsor thereof, must reply, “I renounce them all; and by God’s help will endeavour not to follow, nor be led by them.” In the old order, affirmation is preceded by a necessary renunciation.

  Christians may not be able to follow the experiences of Jacob and his angelic dream, or of Elijah and his still, small voice on Horeb, but in baptism we are meant to follow Jesus across the boundary from one realm into another. Such a realm has as its gift to the faithful the promise of fullness of joy or joy made whole and complete. “If you keep my commandments,” says Jesus in John’s gospel, “you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” (John 15:10–11)

  Perhaps to experience joy, you should go to a black gospel church when first the choir and then the whole congregation “get happy” or carried away in the spirit. It doesn’t happen right away, it takes a while. It begins, and it spreads slowly, gathering momentum, and then no one is immune. It is the kind of worship of which James Baldwin and Richard Wright speak. It is what nearly every black country church and urban storefront church knows; and white people now know something of it by virtue of the exported and denatured secular soul of Motown. As everybody who is in the know knows, Aretha Franklin learned to sing in church, and at the knee of her daddy, the Reverend C. L. Franklin.

  A white friend of sociological mind once asked me why black people, who had so little to sing about, who knew so little joy in either the wicked South or the brutal North, sang so much? Were they singing simply to drive away dull care? Was this a form of diversion, a self-induced ecstasy to kill the throb of a deadening existence? Was this an opiate or a primal scream, or a religious form of kicking the dog after a bad day or week or life? I concluded that my friend had read too much Joseph Campbell and not enough of the Bible. The brothers and sisters weren’t singing to drive dull care away, nor were they irrigating their sorrows or sublimating their fears. Their joy, and that is what it was, in the sense of all three New Testament Greek words, was a consequence of what they had discovered and knew to be true, and this was beyond the level of mere speculation and guesswork. They sang because they knew themselves to be at the thin place between this world and another, and while their daily existence might be bound hand and foot to a world in which there was little about which to be glad, they nevertheless knew that they “had a title to a mansion on high,” and that knowledge was so delicious, so absolute, and so paradoxical that they had to sing about it. Such joy did not make sense out of reality; it transcended and overwhelmed what passed for reality. That is what every cook, hairdresser, chauffeur, Pullman porter, mailman, laundress, seamstress, old auntie, and arthritic uncle knew and recognized as true when Mahalia Jackson would begin to sing:

  Why should I feel discouraged, and why should the shadows fall,

  And why should my heart feel lonely and I dream of a heaven I know

  When Jesus is my portal, a constant friend is he:

  His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me….

  I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free,

  For his eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.

  I didn’t have to go to the south side of Chicago or to exotic Harlem, or even to Roxbury in Boston to hear this; we had it at home, in our little Bethel AME church, right around the corner from where I lived. There weren’t many of us but we knew the gospel when we heard it, and even Mahalia Jackson could not outdo our old neighbor and friend Corrine Walley when she sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

  Now the great question is this: How did we know that “His eye is on the sparrow”? Where did we get that notion? Where did that idea come from? It came from the Bible, of course, and everybody knew that it did. There were many who may have thought that such a message was not for us, the “colored” people, but we knew that the message of freedom and encouragement in Christ, despite every attempt to pervert and to keep it from us, was meant for us; it had our name on it. That fact, pe
rhaps more than anything else, and certainly more than this world’s circumstances in which we found ourselves, gave us cause, without command or a sense of duty, for joy.

  The Context for Joy

  In his famous little book, Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis early on is eager to make a sharp and clear distinction about what joy is and what joy is not. Writing about what he calls “the central story of my life,” he calls joy “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”

  I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them: the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.

  Pleasure is often in our power to give ourselves but we cannot give ourselves joy, and the pursuit of it is frustrating and fruitless, and in the end, he concludes, irrelevant. What about joy? “To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian.” As with much of C. S. Lewis I like the analysis but not the conclusion. His discussion of joy is much like the curate’s egg. When given a bad egg by the squire and asked how he liked it, the curate is said to have replied, “Parts of it are quite good, my Lord.” Joy is not the same as pleasure. Joy cannot be pursued. Joy is elusive. Once you have known joy you will want it again. Joy, however, is not a way to find God. It is not a reward; it may well be result. Joy may be the expression and experience of being the discovered and the discoverer.