I used to worry about joy. Mostly I worried that I didn’t have any, but I couldn’t tell because I wasn’t sure what joy even was. I knew I regularly experienced happiness. But joy? I always sort of pictured it as happiness with a power-up applied. I didn’t know if it required airborne heel-clicks, but they sometimes seemed to be involved? Along with, like, trumpets? Advent and Christmas were always prime times for this worrying, because … well, you know why.
But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.” – Luke 2:10 (NRSV)
Then I had the good fortune to read This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley, creator of Black Liturgies. Among the bulbs she lit over my head: happiness is about the sympathetic nervous system, the excitable part. Joy, on the other hand, is about the parasympathetic nervous system, the part that has to do with calmness, repose. Happiness is quick, exciting, usually caused by something outside yourself. Joy is deeper, abiding, comes more from within than without. Happiness makes you breathe faster; joy makes you breathe slower, and delight in what you smell when you do.
Joy exists independently of happiness. You can have sorrowful joy, joy-despite. You can have joy without laughter—though probably not without at least an occasional smile. And you certainly, Riley says, can have joy without complacency. It’s joy that dreams of a better world, “…but it dreams in peace, not in terror.”
This joy I know, thanks be to God. I hope you do, too.
Prayer ~ Dear God, bless me so hard my breathing slows down. Amen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Quinn G. Caldwell is Chaplain of the Protestant Cooperative Ministry at Cornell University. His most recent book is a series of daily reflections for Advent and Christmas called All I Really Want: Readings for a Modern Christmas. Learn more about it and find him on Facebook at Quinn G. Caldwell.