by Rev. Thomas Disrud

As she stood there, she noticed that some souls were allowed to march right through the pearly gates into heaven. Others, though, were led over to Satan, who threw them into the burning pit. But every so often, instead of hurling a poor soul into the fire, Satan would toss a soul into a small pile off to one side.

After watching Satan do this several times, the woman's curiosity got the best of her. So she strolled over to find out what the devil he was doing. 

“Excuse me, Prince of Darkness,” she said, “I'm waiting my turn for judgment, but I couldn't help wondering, why are you tossing those people aside instead of flinging them into the fires of hell with the others?”

“Ah, those...” Satan said with a groan. “They're all from Portland; they're just too wet to burn!”

I scheduled myself to preach on the topic of joy way back last spring, probably when it was fabulously beautiful outside. I probably thought, yea, that sounds like a good topic for February. So here we are at the beginning of February, in the midst of what seems like several months of unending rain. A stretch of rain that, even in our beloved Portland, has just gone on too long. Is there joy in Mudville?

The truth is that this may not be a bad time at all to be reminded that joy is something we find in all seasons. It is present in all the times of our lives, and not just when we are happy or because the sun is out. Joy, in fact, is an essential part of the spiritual journey. Julian of Norwich, the fourtheenth century mystic, said, “the fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.”

And that is our challenge. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I can forget that simple reality. I can be a little on the serious side more often than not. And I know that I’m not alone in that. After all, the world seems to be going to the proverbal hell in a handbasket, so why should we even be thinking at all about joy?

Should we be cultivating joy in our lives when so many in the world suffer? How does all that add up? Isn’t there just too much work to do?

But it is all part of the whole. If we are not able to be with the joy present in the world, we may also miss out on our ability to be with the sorrow, with all the brokenness all around us. They all move together. The spiritual journey asks us to be mindful of all that life offers us. And joy is important for the spiritual journey. “Always remember, said Rabbi Nachman, the Hasidic teacher, “Joy is not incidental to your spiritual quest, it is vital.”

And of course that is just the point. Our quest is to be in the world as fully as possible. If we can’t, we will know neither joy nor sorrow. In fact, it is in the very act of opening ourselves to all of life that we find our way through—and the awareness of joy helps us through no matter where it is we find ourselves.

One of the main questions on the spiritual journey is how is it that we are to be in the world?

Some years ago there was a day that still sticks in my memory. My first appointment was with someone who, on the surface, seemed to have just about everything she could want: a nice home, a nice car, plenty of opportunity for travel. On the surface her life seemed like one so many people would envy. But when we sat down, what I heard for most of the time was how just about everything was not right. She had one complaint after another, the church, her family, her friends, her life in general. Complain, complain complain. I can’t say it was the best start to the day I have ever had, but I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention.

And then the end of the day comes. Earlier in the day I had received word of another person in the church. She had taken a fall the day before and had to be moved from her apartment to a nursing home. She could not get by on her own. This was a person who was once very independent but because of a series of health issues was not able to be independent any more. She lost the ability to walk. She lost her eyesight and could no longer read, once a great passion for her. And now she had taken a bad fall the day before. I expected that I would go into her room and find a person very low.

But what I found was just the opposite. There she was, her face black and blue, bruises all over her arms. When I said hello her face lit up she said she was delighted to see me. I asked her how she was doing and she expressed frustration at the fall but quickly said, but this a just a short term thing. You know, Tom, she said, I am so lucky. I just don’t have time in the day to do all the things that I want to do. I am so blessed. My life is so full.

Now all of us have complaints, all of us have times when we are not at our best. But what I remember from that day was the two very different ways to look at our place in the world. It is perhaps one of the great mysteries of life how we come to be the individuals that we become. We are the living embodiments of genetics, of family histories, of our personalities, of the relationships we have known, our teachers, our friends, our faith communities and of so much more.

How the spirit moves within us, how we might invite it in or build walls to keep it at bay is also a mystery. Perhaps our main job in life is to be present to what the spirit may bring.

Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi poet, said: “Keep knocking and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look to see who’s there.”

How joy and sorrow live together is part of the great mystery. They live side by side. And they are held together in a kind of paradox that points to mystery.

Another story. My colleague Carl Scovel tells the story of meeting a man one Sunday after church. He was a slim, gray-haired man in a dark-brown double-breasted suit who waited until the other members of the congregation had come through the line. The man’s name was Jim and he shyly introduced himself. After heartfelt thanks, he said Carl’s sermon made him think about his wife.

She was Irish, he said, with a good heart and a good soul and a strong body, so strong, in fact, that she lived for fifteen years with a degenerative nerve disease. Despite her illness she took the burden in raising their three children while Jim brought home the paycheck.

Two years before she died, he took an early retirement and stayed home to care for her. When he could no longer help her in the bathroom, he bathed and clothed her in bed, and all the time, he said, she never lost her good cheer.

“What was it like—after she died?” Scovel asked him.

Jim began to cry. Then he paused and said, “She gave me the greatest gift, a spiritual gift. She gave me courage. Never, never did she complain. Before she died she said, ‘Promise me one thing, that you will have joy.’

“But after she died I went into a slump. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I didn’t want to live. I barely existed—until one morning, when I remembered what she had made me promise, that I would have joy. And then I felt her courage and,” here Jim laughed “I started taking dancing lessons, and now I’m dancing in a local musical here.”

“She made me promise that I would have joy.”

The Indian poet Tagore said:

And Joy is Everywhere;
It is in the Earth’s green covering of grass;
In the blue serenity of the Sky;
In the reckless exuberance of Spring;
In the severe abstinence of gray Winter;
In the Living flesh that animates our bodily frame;
In the perfect poise of the Human figure, noble and upright;
In Living;
In the exercise of all our powers;
In the acquisition of Knowledge;
in fighting evils...
Joy is there Everywhere.

We live, always I believe, in the presence of joy. And yet sometimes it seems so far away. How is it that we cultivate such an awareness?

The religious journey calls us, most of all, to be present with life in all of its fullness—in the violence and destruction so much present in so many ways, in the sorrow that is part of living. But in all of that too is the mindfulness that joy is present in our lives.

In the eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards considered the presence of joy a sign of true religious experience. “It was, he held, the dead giveaway that God was present in someone’s life.”

Cultivating joy would mean first of all being open to what the spirit is calling us to do in any given moment and throughout our lives. To have the courage to move with those stirrings of the heart. If we are able to be open to what matters most, we will know life in its fullness—the sorrow and the joy of it all.

On the spiritual path, we have to be able to see the world for what it is . . . with all its hurt, but also all the possibility that is alive in any given moment. As we seek to make the world whole, we also need to be mindful of how we, too, are whole. Our wholeness contains our brokenness, our sorrow, our possibility and our joy. We bring all of that to whatever we do. We bring all of that to our living.

We must always be available for the stirrings of the spirit.

A Chinese proverb says: “If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.”

We cannot know what any day will bring. We cannot know what turn our lives will take. Our call over and over again is to live with the open heart, to listen to what the spirit might be asking of us, and to know that it will be all right.

We live in times that ask much of us. They ask us to have courage, they ask us to be wise, they ask us to not live in fear, but to live in hope.

We are called again and again into the present moment which calls us to live in a paradox—a world full of suffering and healing, a world that is complex and at the same time simple, a world where new lives enter as others lay dying.

Joy is not about instant gratification or the quick fix to any problem, but something much more. It is the awareness that we are connected to all of life and to a mystery that we can only see in glimpses. It is the awareness that this fullness of life holds us and will not let us go. We are asked to live in faith that in whatever moment we find our selves in, we we have all that we need. And it will be enough.

A little Zen story: A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge.

The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man then saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other.

How sweet it tasted.

It may be that it is at those very times when things seem to be worse than ever that we should be paying the most attention to joy.

Have you noticed in the past many many days of rain the feeling when all of a sudden the sun appears? Have you noticed how you are surprised by the joy of a child’s laughter? Or by the sight of snowdrops or crocuses? Or when you meet the smile on the face of a stranger you meet as you are walking down the street?

And in the moments when we are called to be in the depths of life it seems that we find the depths not only of sorrow, but also the depths of our own possibility. The spirit is present when we know that we are alive and that we are connected with all of life.

As we come into our wholeness, we increase the odds that we might make the world more whole. As we come to know the fulless of life, we increase the odds that the world, too, might come closer to knowing its fullness. As we come into our capacity for joy, may the world, too, be blessed.

Amen.

Prayer

Walk gently on the earth, good people. With every step may you know love, may you know hope, may you know joy. Amen.

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