Every year on the third Sunday of advent, the church asks us to do a meditation on joy. That seems a curious thing to ask, though it becomes less curious when we actually reflect on the nature of joy. What is joy?
Few things are as misunderstood as is the notion of joy. Of itself that wouldn’t be serious except that in this case we are often left chasing the wrong things in life.
Too often we confuse joy with good cheer or with a certain rallying of the spirit that we try to crank up when we go to a party or let off steam on a Friday night. We tend to think of joy this way: There is ordinary time in our lives, when duty, work, emotional and financial burdens, tiredness, worries, and pressure of all kinds keep us from enjoying life and from being as cheery and pleasant as we would like. We think of ordinary times in our lives as keeping us from joy – the grind, the routine, the rat-race, the work-week – and so we look forward to special times, weekends, nights out, vacation times, social times, celebrations, and parties where we can break the routine, break out, enjoy ourselves, and experience joy.
Joy then is identified with the boisterous good cheer we try to crank up at parties or the lack of pressure and the freedom from burdens that we feel when on vacation. But is this joy? It can be, though often isn’t. The loud robust cheer that we enter into at parties is often little more than a desperate effort to keep our depressions at bay, a form of denial. That’s why the good cheer dissolves so quickly when we go home and why, three days after returning from vacation, we are again just as tired and in need of a vacation as before.
What is joy? Joy can never be induced, cranked up, or made to happen. It’s something that has to find us precisely within our ordinary, duty-bound, burdened, full-of-worries, and pressured lives. This is joy: Imagine walking to your car or to the bus after a day’s work, tired, needing some rest. But, just as you reach your car or the bus-stop, you fill with a sense of life and health; in some inchoate way, all jumbled together, you feel your body, mind, soul, gender, sexuality, history, place within a family, network of friends, city, and country, and this feeling makes you spontaneously exclaim: “God, it’s good to be alive!” That’s joy.
And as C.S. Lewis puts it, it has to surprise you. You can’t find joy, it has to find you. That’s its real quality. You can go to a party and say, “Tonight I’m going to have a good time, if it kills me!” It might! Indeed parties and letting off steam have their place. You might even find good cheer at a party or find a good distraction and these can be needed therapy and a good respite from hard work. But neither is joy.
Joy is always the by-product of something else. As the various versions of The Prayer of St. Francis put it, we can never attain joy, consolation, peace, forgiveness, love, and understanding by actively pursuing them. We attain them by giving them out. That’s the great paradox at the centre of all spirituality and one of the great foundational truths within the universe itself: The air that we breathe out is the air we will eventually breathe back in. Joy will come to us if we set about actively trying to create it for others.
If I go about my life demanding, however unconsciously, that others carry me rather than seeking to carry them; feeding off of others rather than trying to feed them; creating disorder rather than being a principle of peace; demanding to be admired rather than admiring, and demanding that others meet my needs rather than trying to meet theirs, joy will never find me, no matter how hard I party or try to crank up good cheer. I’m breathing the wrong air into the universe.
The great mystic, John of the Cross, ends one of his most famous instructions with this poem:
To reach satisfaction in all desire its possession in nothing. To come to possess all desire the possession of nothing. To arrive at being all desire to be nothing. To come to the knowledge of all desire the knowledge of nothing. To come to the pleasure you have not you must go by the way in which you enjoy not. To come to the knowledge you have not you must go by a way in which you know not. To come to the possession you have not you must go by a way in which you possess not. To come to be what you are not you must go by a way in which you are not.
That, and that alone, is a recipe for joy.
4. prayer
Prayer
“O Lord, you are my hope when times are rough. When I encounter heavy burdens, you lift me up and give me a reason to hope for the future. Through you, my heart becomes filled with joy. I have faith that everything that happens is a part of your plan. While I struggle under my burden, I know that you are there to support me and guide me through everything that happens. No matter what happens during this day, I know that your everlasting joy will await me. Even when I struggle and face obstacles, I will feel happy knowing that I am doing your bidding. Please bless me and help me to grow in my knowledge of you. In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen.”
My friend and brilliant translator of many mystics, Mirabai Starr, who lives nearby in Taos, New Mexico, has encountered numerous deaths and losses, each cultivating in her a deeper spiritual practice and longing for God. But the death of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Jenny, in a car crash was “an avalanche,” Starr writes, “annihilating everything in its path”:
Suddenly, the sacred fire I have been chasing all my life engulfed me. I was plunged into the abyss, instantaneously dropped into the vast stillness and pulsing silence at which all my favorite mystics hint. So shattered I could not see my own hand in front of my face, I was suspended in the invisible arms of a Love I had only dreamed of. Immolated, I found myself resting in fire. Drowning, I surrendered, and discovered I could breathe under water.
So this was the state of profound suchness I had been searching for during all those years of contemplative practice. This was the holy longing the saints had been talking about in poems that had broken my heart again and again. This was the sacred emptiness that put that small smile on the face of the great sages. And I hated it. I didn’t want vastness of being. I wanted my baby back.
But I discovered that there was nowhere to hide when radical sorrow unraveled the fabric of my life. I could rage against the terrible unknown—and I did, for I am human and have this vulnerable body, passionate heart, and complicated mind—or I could turn toward the cup, bow to the Cupbearer, and say, “Yes.”
I didn’t do it right away, nor was I able to sustain it when I did manage a breath of surrender. But gradually I learned to soften into the pain and yield to my suffering. In the process, compassion for all suffering beings began unexpectedly to swell in my heart. I became acutely aware of my connectedness to mothers everywhere who had lost children, who were, at this very moment, hearing the impossible news that their child had died. . . . .
Grief strips us. According to the mystics, this is good news. Because it is only when we are naked that we can have union with the Beloved. We can cultivate spiritual disciplines designed to dismantle our identity so that we have hope of merging with the Divine. Or someone we love very much may die, and we may find ourselves catapulted into the emptiness we had been striving for. Even as we cry out in the anguish of loss, the boundless love of the Holy One comes pouring into the shattered container of our hearts. This replenishing of our emptiness is a mystery, it is grace, and it is built into the human condition.
Few among us would ever opt for the narrow gate of grief, even if it were guaranteed to lead us to God. But if our most profound losses—the death of a loved one, the ending of a marriage or a career, catastrophic disease or alienation from community—bring us to our knees before that threshold, we might as well enter. The Beloved might be waiting in the next room.
Reference: Mirabai Starr, God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Monkfish Book Publishing Company: 2012), 63-65.
4. Prayer
Oh Lord, hear my prayer and grant me the peace that passes all understanding. Show me the way to your throne so I may sit at your feet and know your abiding comfort. Let a wellspring of joy rise from my heart until it overflows. Lead me to your garden of peace, so I may sit among the angels. Let me hear their songs of praise and know peace within my soul once more. Amen."
It is your destiny to see as God sees to know as God knows,
to feel as God feels. How is this possible? How? Because divine love cannot
deny its very self, divine love will be eternally true to its own being, and
its being is giving all it can to the present moment. And the greatest gift God
can give is God’s own experience. Every object, every creature, every man,
woman and child has a soul and it is the destiny of all, to see as God sees, to
know as God knows, to feel as God feels, to be as God is.
(Meister Eckhart, in ‘Love
Poems from God,’ ed Daniel Ladinsky)
The two Christian mystics quoted above have helped me to escape
the trap of perfectionism which always leads to an entrenched shadow. The wise
Benedictine Brother David Steindl-Rast describes this common ploy:
In its enthusiasm for the divine light, Christian theology has
not always done justice to the divine darkness. . . . We tend to get trapped in
the idea of a static perfection that leads to rigid perfectionism. Abstract
speculation can create an image of God that is foreign to the human heart. .
. [A God that does not contain our shadows.] Then we try to
live up to the standards of a God that is purely light, and we can’t handle the
darkness within us. And because we can’t handle it, we suppress it. But the
more we suppress it, the more it leads its own life, because it’s not
integrated. Before we know it, we are in serious trouble.
You can get out of that trap if you come back to the core of the
Christian tradition, to the real message of Jesus. You find him, for instance,
saying, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” [Matthew 5:48]. Yet
he makes it clear that this is not the perfection of suppressing the darkness,
but the perfection of integrated wholeness. [Richard: Emphasis
mine.] That’s the way Matthew puts it in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus
talks of our Father in heaven who lets the sun shine on the good and the bad,
and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike [see Matthew 5:45].
It’s both the rain and the sun, not only the sun. And it’s both the just and
the unjust. Jesus stresses the fact that God obviously allows the interplay of
shadow and light. God approves of it. If God’s perfection allows for tensions
to work themselves out, who are we to insist on a perfection in which all
tensions are suppressed? . . .
[As Paul
writes,] “By grace you have been saved” [Ephesians 2:8]. That’s one of the
earliest insights in the Christian tradition: it’s not by what you do that you
earn God’s love. Not because you are so bright and light and have purged out
all the darkness does God accept you, but as you are. Not by doing something,
not by your works, but gratis you have been saved. That means you belong. God
has taken you in. God embraces you as you are—shadow and light, everything. God
embraces it, by grace. And it has already happened.
David Steindl-Rast, “The Shadow
in Christianity,” in Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark
Side of Human Nature, ed. Jeremiah Abrams and Connie Zweig (Jeremy P.
Tarcher: 1991), 132,133.
4. Poem by Mary Oliver
“Wild Geese”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Why we love this poem: If you’ve ever felt that the world was falling down around you, this poem serves as a soothing reminder to connect with yourself, with nature, and with others around you. Oliver’s image of geese in flight is meant to lift the reader and carry them out of any despair and loneliness that they might be feeling.
Thank you for your great love for us. You sent your only Son to live with us and show us how to love. He gave His life for us and resurrected on that third day so that we could also be with you in eternity!
Lord, to feel just an inch of the radiance of your love and the glow from your excellence will be more than we can imagine. Knowing your love for us is humbling too.
We are imperfect humans moving around on this Earth day to day attempting to live lives that are worthy of the calling you have on us. We need your guidance and direction.
Father, for the woman that needs to feel your love today, I pray that you give her eyes to see and ears to hear your love for her. You know her name, her past, her triumphs, and her wounds. Let her know it is never too late to call on you, ask for your forgiveness, give her life to your service, rebuke the sin that is entangling her, and live free as a Child of God. For those alone or feeling unloved, let their love for you be so fierce that it radiates back to them. Let them live each day forward knowing you love them more than they can imagine and that they are not alone.
Father, for the woman that finds it easier to love herself than others, give her eyes to see how special all of your children are. Give her opportunities to sit down with those that don’t look or think like her so that she can learn what it really means to love her neighbor. Help her to be kind, encouraging, forgiving, loving to those that may never realize her impact, and move forward with the ability to treat others with love no matter what. Give her the grace and strength to move from day to day with an outpouring of love for her neighbor.
Father, for the woman that finds it easier to love others more than herself, give her the gift of self-love and forgiveness. Hold her and embrace her. Give her permission to take care of herself, to enjoy the things that make her heart sing, and give her the time it takes to do those things. You love her servant heart, Lord, please let her feel the peace that your love wants to give her in these busy days we all live in.
Thank you Father that no matter where our hearts are you are always reaching out to love us unconditionally! You are the ultimate example of love and we are so grateful for that!
I used tofu instead of the usual beef for this gyro recipe. I wanted it to be tasty and smoky. This simple rub I used for the tofu is pretty good. Smoky but not overwhelming. The rub penetrated through the tofu and you can taste it when biting into the semi crisp top of the tofu.
The pita bread is a must for me. I bought the pita bread from a gyro shop when I had this craving for a good old gyro that is vegan. The shop did not have a vegan gyro offering and I am glad they sold me the pita bread so I can make my own.
The tzatziki sauce makes the gyro completely satisfying. The recipe I used did not have cucumber since I did not have any but I was still happy and so was picky taster, my husband, who had two of the fabulous gyros.
Vegan Smoky Tofu Gyro with Tzatziki Sauce
Smoky Tofu
1 tsp baking powder (not baking soda)
1 tsp each garlic, onion, coriander, smoked paprika powders
1/4 tsp each salt and black pepper
one 16 oz block tofu cut into eight pieces
Mix all ingredients except the tofu in a small bowl. Spread this dry rub mixture on a plate and press both sides of tofu pieces on top of the rub.
Air fry the tofu slices at 250 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 minutes then flip and air fry for 5 or more minutes till top is crispy
Tzatziki Sauce
juice of 1/2 lemon
3 tbsp vegan mayo (I used Hellman Vegan Mayo or use an oil free one from recipes below)
