Joy

Joy always rises at the most surprising times and in the most unexpected places. Here are three unlikely proponents of joy: a comedian, a novelist, and a pope.

First, the comedian. Stephen Colbert is currently star of The Colbert Report and one of America's funniest personalities, but there's more to his story than most television viewers know.  His father and two brothers were killed in a plane crash when he was 10 years old, and he was raised primarily by his mother.  Her faith marked him for life.  He teaches Sunday school and attends mass regularly with his family.  Colbert once appeared at Fordham University with Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan to discuss "humor, joy, and the spiritual life."  He told a packed crowd that "joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God."

Next, the novelist. Frederick Buechner adds his own light to this matter of joy:

In the Gospel of John, Jesus sums up pretty much everything by saying, "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full" (John 15:11). He said it at the supper that he knew was the last one at which he'd have a mouth to eat with. Happiness turns up more or less where you'd expect it to — a good marriage, a rewarding job, a pleasant vacation. Joy, on the other hand, is as notoriously unpredictable as the one who bequeaths it (Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words).

Finally, a pope weighs in on the matter of joy. Above everything else, John Paul II embodied passion and joy in Christ.  Consider this observation: "It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal."

Joy comes from an unshakeable confidence in God and an immovable conviction that He is for us. C. S. Lewis wrote that he was "surprised by joy." Joy will always be a surprise, but it will never be an accident.

Heaven on Earth

Weddings get much of the attention and most of the money, but marriage holds the potential for wholeness. The mechanics of weddings are somewhat simple and relatively routine, while there is nothing mechanical or simple about marriage. As a matter of fact, it's far easier to get married than it is to get un-married these days. If the two realities were reversed, the numbers of both might diminish proportionately. Really all you need to get married is a bride, a groom (or two brides or two grooms in some states), a marriage license, and someone authorized by the State to ratify the contract. Everything else is adornment, as elaborate or as simple as the bride chooses and the bride's father can afford. But when the euphoria ebbs and the dust of passion settles, the hard work of forging a friendship ensues. I say friendship because physical attraction is fickle, rising and descending with corresponding hormone levels, and romance more frequently than not bows to the press of life; however, friendship transforms marriage into a narrative of mutual grace. Grace is required to navigate both deep waters and shallow shoals. Undeserved adulation makes me better than I am, and I in turn serve more passionately than I was capable of before. Grace extended is divine; grace reciprocated is divinely human. And mutual grace is heaven on earth, which, after all, is what the marriage friendship is intended to be. "It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself than I can imagine ever having found in any other kind of relationship."(Frederick Buechner)

Honesty

Honest self-evaluation is a grueling experience, but no personal growth comes apart from authentic introspection and courageous confession. Self-deception is the most ludicrous state of man. It's not that it's a strain for me to be hard on myself, but that I am selective about what I choose to regret. For that reason, and that reason alone, I am to blame for my own state of regression. Until I own up to every personal fault, failure, shortcoming, and self-induced sin without sloughing the blame onto someone else's shoulders, I remain confined to performing in a narrow theatre in which I am both actor and audience. 

Familiarity

No doubt you've heard the phrase "familiarity breeds contempt." While that may be true in some areas of life, I hesitate to apply it to biblical truth.  Instead, I would say that familiarity often breeds apathy.  Here's what I mean: our very  familiarity with the story of the cross may be the very thing that distances us from its impact.  We become, in the worst sense of the word, "objective." There is grave danger in studying theology in third person.  We speak about God. We talk about things like incarnation, justification, atonement, redemption, sanctification, and we do it all from the comfortable distance of third person--He did this. He said that. He is prophet, priest and king.  "He." But God orchestrated human redemption so that we may move from third person to first and second person--  "I" and. "You." "I once was lost but now am found.""You are Lord of heaven and earth." "You are my savior and my God."

We could speak intelligently and convincingly of Jesus Christ and his earthly ministry, compelling teaching, convincing miracles, his courageous response to scourging and triumphant declaration from the cross, "It is finished." But what makes this whole thing matter is when I am able to say honestly and humbly:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind but now I see.

His Loss, My Gain

His loss, my gain. These words do more than summarize, they exact the whole import of the cross. Grace is always cross-shaped and redemption is always particular. Not to detract from his general work of securing future grace since Christ died for the sins of the world, but, astonishingly, he offered himself up for my sin in particular.  Although I will never choose to escape the responsibility and privilege of life enjoyed in community with family and friends, something deep within rouses to the thought of excusing myself from the company of others in order to relish and revel privately in the ecstasy of grace, unimaginable pardon for unforgivable sin. You may not hear it from my lips in word or harmony, but my soul breaks free in jubilant round, descanting my own strain of mercy inserted above the anthem of the redeemed. Forever will I declare his loss as my gain and his grace as my life. 

Grace Sees

Grace sees and refuses to blink. For one woman, grace happened as she knelt in dirt at the feet of Jesus. More out of shame than humility, her collapse was less intention than reflex.  Not far from the two of them, mob stares inflicted greater pain to her than did the threat of the rocks they grasped in angry hands.  It was not so much the words they used that was the vocabulary of that awful moment, it was the abject absence of dignity. Perhaps the lowest act of inhumanity is simply to withhold dignity.  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but inhumanity may destroy me. No doubt this woman had entered and lingered in adulthood without being recognized as valuable. Passed from one to the other, she was never held by someone as sacred, only held in the process of being used. She'd grown accustomed to the shame, but refused to be comfortable with the same.  That's when she heard of this healing teacher. Not just a teacher who healed, but someone who restored even as he inspired; someone who returned all that had been taken.  She fought her fears. Could this be one more more instance of something that seemed too good to be true? She had heard those lines before, promises of love, lying eyes behind the flattery.  Or was this man different?  Was the healing teacher sent from God? Was it possible that he was God himself? So, she cast herself before him, not so much that she had nothing to lose, but that she was willing to gamble on this one chance to win. She knew what it was like to lose. Her life had been a succession of losing choices, losing relationships, losing moments.  A life lost in quicksand of regret. So, she rolled the dice on one opportunity to be real, her one chance to be herself rather than the object that others had recreated in their own image and for their own pleasure.

No one knows for sure what Jesus stopped to write in the dirt on that awful awesome day. Many speculate he scrawled a litany of sins that the accusers were forced to recognize as their own. Others propose that Jesus used a finger to indent a scripture in the sand. I choose to believe he did something entirely different and something more meaningful to her than anyone could have imagined -- he wrote her name. And in so doing, he gave back to her her heart. Here is one thing each of us can do for the outcast.  Irregardless of cause and effect, the one gift we hold at the ready for every human being is to ascribe worth, acknowledging human value through eye contact, spoken word, calling someone by name. To be Jesus is more often than not, simply to say with our eyes "I see you, and you matter."

Constant and Context

Sports cars aren't the only things that turn on a dime.  In algebraic terms, God is the constant and context the variable. Late Thursday night I had settled in comfortably for repose and reading in our garden room and all was right in my world when life turned sharply, altered by a stolen breath. Jerked from my solace by growling and barking outside, I rushed to the doorway and was challenged by two large unfamiliar dogs. My left hand clumsily groped for the garden shovel, found it, and for the moment wielded it like a light saber at the invaders. A shaggy black lab took off, but a grey leopard spotted catahoula faced me down until a couple of blows enticed him to make a hasty exit. To be honest, I felt a bit taller in the moment for having bested the two strays, that is, until I noticed an out of place swatch of white on the grass to my left. To my horror, I realized it was Hemingway, our young Himalayan--the sweetest cat I'll ever know, and the prettiest cat I'll ever hold. I rushed to him, but the verdict was already written and all too painfully evident. With more reaction than thought, I secured his body in the garden room, went inside to grab my Smith & Wesson, loaded all six chambers, and set out into the night seeking revenge. Two hours later, my search by foot and by Jeep ended without result. The two unwelcome visitors may still be running for all I know, or they may have claimed another innocent prey, but I will likely never see them again. Life altered irreversibly in an instant by forces out of my control. 

Sound familiar? Illness that bursts on the scene like a hostile takeover. A relationship crumbles that was once thought to be an impregnable fortress. The sudden storm that takes away a lifetime of earning and effort. Far more than disappointment, hope is dashed on the pavement of reality. How should we react? How may we best respond? I have determined that I will never know the answer to all my questions (that is, until I kneel before the Answer), so I will work, instead, at asking the most productive ones. Rather than positing the all too familiar "why?" I will inquire "what now?" One seems to invite paralysis while the other incites action. I choose the latter, irregardless of the uncertainty that lingers like an early morning fog. I do so, because I choose to adopt the stance I've sung about as long as I can remember:

"Great is Thy faithfulness, 

O God my Father,

There is no shadow of turning with     Thee;

Thou changest not, 

Thy compassions, they fail not

As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be."

Is the Grass Greener?

Beware the bovine trap of greener grass. I know you've watched it. A heifer surrounded by ample supplies of coastal or alfalfa, stretches and strains through angry wire in order to get at what remains just out of reach. You've also watched it played out in the human arena: Marriage, Business, Family, Friendships. Not satisfied with what lies at hand, we grope toward what will never be fully ours, or if by some twist it becomes ours, will never satisfy. What Nancy C. Anderson calls the "Greener Grass Syndrome" is an addiction that destroys joy and service. Thankfully, there is an antidote for this lure of the other. That powerful potion is uncloistered by the word "enough." This moment is enough, you are enough, I am enough. Christ is more than enough. Why is contentment important? Or, is it?  Actually, it's essential to everything that matters. Satisfaction with the grass on my side of the fence is the very thing that allows me to recognize the needs on the other side. Buechner reminds us:  

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” 

The resolution of my lust is the beginning of all selfless ministry.