It is probably fair to say that after love, joy is the uncommon quality most commonly associated with Christian life. "Joy," wrote the biblical theologian G.G. Findlay, "is more conspicuous in Christianity than in any other religion." Others agree.
When in the 18th century Jonathan Edwards proposed signs to separate true religious experience from its counterfeits, the Puritan preacher recommended that we look for joy. It was, he held, the dead giveaway that God was present in someone's life. The Roman Catholic spiritual director Baron Friedrich von Hugel reminded us that the canonization process in his tradition required that we find joy in the lives of candidates for sainthood, or their causes would be poked full of holes. He quoted and approved St. Philip Neri's observation: "There is no such thing as a sad saint."
The Protestant theologian Emil Brunner wrote, "Joy is the feeling we have when we really are ourselves." Paul Tillich, in agreement, said, "Joy is nothing else than an awareness of being fulfilled in our true being." And Karl Rahner has written a splendid essay placing joy at the heart of the mysticism of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order.
I am embarrassed to say that for a good part of my life, I did not know the joy these people describe. Or, perhaps more accurately, I knew it as a child and lost its abiding fervor along the way. I was only recently surprised by joy, to borrow C.S. Lewis' phrase, and according to my experience, that is exactly how we are introduced (or re-introduced) to it—by surprise, and not by our own design.
One of the first things I learned about joy was that I had confused it with excitement, pleasure, fun, and happiness. It is not at all like these, except that, again as Lewis says, once we taste any of them, we will want more. In addition to the fact that we can produce, and to some degree control, our fun and pleasure, these are in comparison to joy surface qualities.
Joy sinks far deeper into one's being and dwells there much like the easy purring of a reliable car engine, aware of but unperturbed by bad weather. Joy anchors itself deeply, establishes roots, and endures in the worst circumstances alongside an unconquerable gladness that no barrier can confine.
Prior to being surprised by joy, I had a limited view of its possibilities. I restricted joy to Christmas, Easter, and special occasions in between. Weddings counted; and babies being born—"bundles of joy"—were proper causes of celebration. But I was not prepared for the many times that call for rejoicing, once joy has been hooked into one's heart.
When joy connects with a capacity to wonder at the extravagant detail of God's doings in and around one's life, consciousness is raised. Wonder's appeal is that it opens up a world to stun and dazzle us, and it offers us as its prime insight that joy is to be had and done not in some future time when good finally triumphs, but now. Even now, in the middle of calamity, crisis, unfinished business, brokenness, pain, and indifference, rejoicing is to be. I believe this was the Apostle Paul's experience: he was in Christ, a new creature, and he had begun to experience the salvation of God. If there was a better reason to rejoice than that, Paul does not seem to have been aware of one.
The Bible brims with testimonies about joy. "The joy of the Lord is my strength" (Nehemiah 8:10). "Shout to the Lord with songs of joy" (Psalm 47:1). "Let the hills rejoice for joy" (Psalm 98:8). "Rejoice always" (1 Thessalonians 5:16). "Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say, Rejoice" (Philippians 4:4).
Paul and Luke emerge, hands down, as the uncontested ambassadors of joy in the New Testament. It is Luke who first shows us the link between joy and the Holy Spirit. When someone witnesses to joy in Luke and Acts, the Holy Spirit cannot be far away. Mary, for example, exclaimed, "My spirit rejoices" (Luke 1:47) shortly after the Holy Spirit was proclaimed (Luke 1:35). Elizabeth was "filled with the Holy Spirit" (Luke 1:41) with the resultant "leaping for joy" (Luke 1:44) in her womb. The book of Acts neatly sums up the connection: "the disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit" (Acts 13:52).
Paul's joy rested with the cross in which he "gloried" (Galatians 6:14), the resurrection whose first fruits he had seen (1 Corinthians 9:11), and the gift of the Spirit which was at work in him and the church (1 Corinthians 12:4-11). For Paul, these things were actual happenings that had taken place in real history. They were not merely matters of religious experience, but also matters of historical fact. Thus, Paul could claim some objectivity about his bedrock advice to rejoice always.
Paul became the great example of one who could be suffering yet always rejoicing, for he was convinced that his misfortunes and those of others were God's medium for blessings and materials for thanksgiving. Because his joy had its source beyond mere earthly human joy, it was indestructible by outward circumstances. Some causes of Paul's joy, of course, were vulnerable because they were dependent on the fortunes of other believers, but even then he was convinced that the One who had begun a good work in them would complete it on the Day of Christ.
Paul is, for me, the chief witness among many that joy is to be found in the most unusual places. "Joy" is the word most frequently found (after "love") in the sermons of the late Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, and it was the subject of his final homily at Divine Providence Hospital Chapel. It was a sentiment that indwelled the memory of the archbishop after his death, too. Jorge Lara-Braud, director of the Council on Theology and Culture of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, wrote:
Days later, I found out that the assassin's bullet went through his heart just as he was finishing the words of the institution of the Eucharist. "This is my body which will be given up for you ... This is the cup of my blood ... shed for you." I felt a strange sense of joy.
Lara-Braud's comment testifies to the paradox that Christian joy is to be found in the midst of sadness, affliction, and care. Indeed, this is precisely where it gives proof of its power.
The poor, deprived of so many of life's pleasures, are not without joy. Dorothy Day urged her fellow Catholic Workers to share bread and joy, and she chose "joy" (of all the words at her literary disposal) to eulogize her friend Peter Maurin. And joy is—again and again—the characteristic description of the martyrs as they went off to their deaths. "They raised their voices in songs, and with great rejoicing, surrendered their lives," St. Cyprian wrote of a band of Christians facing execution in the third century.
This would all sound perverse and morbid were it not for the pattern of normalcy that accompanies joy. A friend of mine once said this of joy: "Equipped with it, I am able to accomplish many jobs that look too difficult or tiresome to be done, I can cope with people also difficult, I am able to endure disquietudes and discomforts with long-suffering cheer that is not my native disposition." Joy, then, is not the sentiment of people who have lost their marbles and their hold on reality. Nor is it a pious wish, but rather a permanent, all-pervasive character of the Christian, irrepressibly active, filled with inward satisfaction and outgoing benediction.
Another reason why I have no trouble picturing processions of Christians marching off en masse with joy in their hearts to prison cells or even to their executions is that I am aware of the contagion of joy. It spreads like wildfire.
But I am also willing to concede the power of joy's opposite: depression and despair. The early church, too, was alert to the pastoral crises caused by this plague.
That awareness is recorded as early as the second century in penitential documents in which the church studied the sins most destructive of community. It singled out murder, apostasy, and adultery. The church reckoned, accurately, it seems to me, that no community could survive them. But when the list of sins was expanded, dejection of spirit was added as a close fourth. No community could survive that either, for despair has an insidious capacity to inveigle others into its cunning paralysis.
The early Christian communities understood themselves as post-Pentecost communities of joy, and anything that deflected that joy warranted a red-alert warning. The community did what it could to reinforce and reclaim the Pentecost ardor and to banish debilitating despondency from its midst.
This brings me to the subject of those who delight in chipping away at another's joy. Though I have spoken of joy's endurability and its capacity for the long haul, it is true that killjoys are skillful in undermining the faith from which joy springs, and of tossing it off balance.
It may be well to keep in mind that we cannot deflect the strategy of killjoys single-handedly. Joy needs the human contact with community and the support of others to keep it alive.
But let's be honest about this. If we need community to keep our joy alive, we're in a lot of trouble, for joy is not a strong suit in our mainstream churches, in spite of Scripture's counsel that it be otherwise.
Reflecting on joy, however, may inspire us to alter the status quo and to anoint each other with the oil of gladness with more readiness, consistency, and regularity than before. Maybe we owe it to each other to do just that. Maybe we owe it to ourselves to survey our culpability as squelchers of joy in others and of being part of systems and institutions that do not tolerate, let alone encourage, joy. Maybe we need to redress the balance of somberness by gladdening others with support, kind words, encouragement, laughter, hope, time, and the simple gift of self. It wouldn't hurt. It could heal. And it would point to that kingdom first heralded by angels who proclaimed the "good tidings of great joy" that went hand-in-hand with "peace on earth."
Doris Donnelly was an associate professor of pastoral theology and spirituality at St. John's University in New York city when this article, which is adapted from her book Dark Lightning: The Theological Validation of Christian Religious Experience, appeared.
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