Singing in the Shower Joy

You cannot manufacture joy.  You might be able to make yourself or someone else happy, but you cannot set out to make yourself joyful.  I encountered a restaurant sign which invited me to spread joy by buying their gift certificates.  While my purchase of the gift certificates would bring the restaurant owner happiness with another sale, and while my giving the certificate would make the recipient happy to have a free meal of food they enjoy, and while even I might be happy to have made someone else happy, I don’t think there is any joy being spread around in this transaction.  I don’t believe I can manufacture joy for myself or anyone else by trying to make joy happen. No, there is an essential difference between happiness and joy. Happiness might be “two kinds of ice cream”, like the Charlie Brown song says, but that isn’t joy.  Joy is something else. Joy is what you happens to you when you encounter something so unexpected, so startling, that it makes you feel like you are dreaming; that your mouth fills up with laughter; that you start singing even though you don’t consider yourself a singer. (Psalm 126)

THE JOY BEYOND the walls of the world more poignant than grief. Even in church you catch glimpses of it sometimes though church is apt to be the last place because you are looking too hard for it there. It is not apt to be so much in the sermon that you find it or the prayers or the liturgy but often in something quite incidental like the evening the choral society does the Mozart Requiem, and there is your friend Dr. X, who you know thinks the whole business of religion is for the birds, singing the Kyrie like a bird himself—Lord, have mercy, have mercy—as he stands there among the baritones in his wilted shirt and skimpy tux; and his workaday basset-hound face is so alive with if not the God he wouldn't be caught dead believing in then at least with his twin brother that for a moment nothing in the whole world matters less than what he believes or doesn't believe— Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison—and as at snow, dreams, certain memories, at fairy tales, the heart leaps, the eyes fill. (F. Buechner, Glimpses of Joy)

In this season of waiting for light, may you find so much more than momentary happiness. May you instead be surprised by joy. May you be blessed to have revealed to you something so totally unexpected that it your heart leaps, your eyes fill. May you be startled with a vision so powerful that the mere memory of it makes you want to sing in the shower at the top of your lungs.  May your song be that of the angels: Let heaven and earth rejoice!  The gift of Love is revealed once more. To you.