The Fruit of the Spirit is...Joy

I can't get it out of my head how the sermon on Sunday pushed up against the materials we're studying at Morning Blend...without even trying. This happens all the time. And, perhaps, it's because the story of redemption has themes that just match up all the time. Or, perhaps, it's because are ears are tuned to hear things when we're paying attention. Or, perhaps, the Creator is just making sure that we hear it over and over again in all kinds of places so that the message will stick.

Pastor Healy spoke on Sunday about keeping our oil lamps full...about paying attention to what fills the lamp so that, at a moment's notice, we are ready for the Bridegroom. So that, in fact, we never let it run empty. We don't leave the house without it. We don't put it off until later. And he mentioned the fruit that flows from a lamp full of oil - the fruit of the Spirit, of course. This is the very thing we're studying.

I was reminded of last year's study of One Thousand Gifts. And, it seems to me anyway, one of the ways that we receive oil for our lamps is through gratitude, which, in turn, brings joy. When we remember to be thankful our cup overflows with joy..."the oil of joy" (Isaiah 61).

This part of our study is so timely, also, as the season of Thanksgiving is upon us. If you haven't been over to Ann Voskamp's site in a while, it's worth checking out her thoughts on Thanksgiving: Why Thanksgiving is Radically Subversive {And Everything You Need to Have the Best Thanksgiving Yet}. I stumbled completely astonished upon these words in her post, which fit right in with Pastor Healy's sermon about the women waiting for the Bridegroom in Matthew 25, as though it was planned. Wow.

You can live your life as the bride married to Hurry, having affairs with Not Enough, Always Stress, and Easy Cynicism.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement, vowed to Awe Himself, covenanted to Christ –and I took the whole of everything He gave in this gloried world into my open arms with thanks.

And here's something we do at our house to remember to give thanks and to allow our lamps to fill with the oil of joy: Last year we started the tradition of writing gifts/gratitudes on decorated squares of paper throughout the month of November and dropping them in a jar. At the end of the season, we hole-punched the papers and put them on a ring. We hung it from a hook on our mantle all year. We've got the jar back out this month again, and we're counting our gifts again.

 

If you want to read more on our previous studies of joy, gifts, and gratitude, click the "Joy" or "One Thousand Gifts" labels on the sidebar. 

Brené Brown: Listening to Shame

We've been having some talks about regret, guilt and shame in our follow up discussions of One Thousand Gifts, and Beth sent me the link to the following TED Talk:

Brené Brown: Listening to shame
http://on.ted.com/i0AwA


From the website:

Shame is an unspoken epidemic, the secret behind many forms of broken behavior. Brené Brown, whose earlier talk on vulnerability became a viral hit, explores what can happen when people confront their shame head-on. Her own humor, humanity and vulnerability shine through every word.

It's a struggle when we realize that we have not been living in the moment the way we could have been, that we have not responded to people out of a place of grace and thanks. The Bible, though, is very clear that we aren't meant to live in regret:

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.   2 Corinthians 7:10

OpenBible.com has a list of suggested scriptures for those struggling with regret: http://www.openbible.info/topics/regret

Lent, Suffering, and One Thousand Gifts

Beth emailed me this week and suggested that there might be a connection between this week's study and Lent. Strangely (or not), I had recently finished up the following post on my private blog...about Lent and Joy. If anyone else has thoughts to add, I'd love to hear them and can post them here, too (you can reply in email or in the comments)...

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The thing that "gets" me every time I sit down to really take a look at joy, at what it is, what it means, and how we find it (practice it? develop it? live it?) is the inclusion of suffering in the equation. A discussion about joy only goes so far before one runs into some seriously dark questions. How can I find joy when I lose someone precious? When war erupts? When a job is lost? When trust is broken? When hope seems so very, very far away?

It's easy to be joyful when life clips along smoothly and things go as planned. But is that really joy? I think sometimes it is. We can be both happy and joyful. All too often, though, when happiness wanes, we find that we must dig deep to find an underlying joy.  Walt Wangerin, Jr. says,

"The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can't stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief."

Wangerin then draws a connection to the church season of Lent, a time when many church folks mark themselves with ashes and put on grief and mourning, when we deprive ourselves in order to remember suffering and to bring forth...joy?

"In the sorrows of the Christ - as we ourselves experience them - we prepare for Easter, for joy. There can be no resurrection from the dead except first there is a death! But then, because we love him above all things, his rising is our joy. And then the certain hope of our own resurrection warrants the joy both now and forever."

In the same way, the Jews taste the bitter herbs during the Passover Seder, to remember the suffering, to increase the joy. "When Adar comes, joy is increased."

So much of me is still resistant to this idea.  Does this mean that God wills suffering? Even that God allows suffering for our own character development is too much for me. I can abide that God allows suffering because people have free will, and God allows for free will, and free will sometimes means that horrific things happen. But I cannot abide a God who allows suffering for my own character development. Maybe minor suffering - like reaping the consequences of my own mistakes. This is the kind of suffering I allow my children. I want them to learn from their mistakes. So, I don't step in and fix everything for them. But if something or someone else is threatening my child? You better believe I'll step in. You better believe I'll do everything I can to save them.

William P. Young takes on this idea in his book, The Shack, by suggesting that it makes a difference that we are all children of God. So, of course, I would defend my child against someone hurting them. But what if one of my children hurts one of my other children? Am I quite so ruthless then? Will I still go all "Mama Bear" when my child is being hurt? Most likely, the answer is more that I want to save both of them. I want the perpetrator to be spared...in case there's a possibility for a change of heart. I want the victim to be safe. I want them both to know I love them. I hope that my love has the power to change.

But then, the analogy also breaks down when we are talking about God because God has the power to bring about both outcomes, right? And it seems that at least some of the time God has stepped in to save some children, who need saving, and to destroy some children bent on destruction. The Bible tells us so. And then I come all the way back to the original question. Is suffering allowed because it brings about greater joy? Is it really true that we only know true joy in the face of (or aftermath of) sorrow? Is this why some suffering is allowed? I am afraid I don't have any answers. My hands come up full of ashes.

I know for sure that, as a human, I am, indeed, more aware of the joys in life when I have suffered, when I have been wounded. The joys, then, are piercing, poignant. I remember this beautiful scene in Tolkien's book, The Return of the King, when Frodo and Sam return after destroying the ring: 

“And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”

I know that feeling...when joy is like swords.

And I think that maybe this is something we can only understand in stories. It is something we only know in the living out of our lives. It isn't something that can be known in so many words or explained in the theology books. It isn't something that makes sense. It is something that is in the fabric of our humanness, and, perhaps, it is something of God's image in us. Joy following suffering, following the epic drama.

And does God allow it? Does God create it? I don't know. I know God uses it. I think I understand that God suffers, too. That God suffers with us. Mike Freeman in his blog, "wordhavering," sums up some ideas of Nadia Bolz-Weber and Richard Rohr this way (from his blog post: caged god):

"In our suffering we tend to experience God as outside of it all, watching, a omnipotent bystander who by all rights could and should be able to do something, but he just sits there, stands there, whatever, letting it all happen anyway. Helping it all happen anyway? And for his glory? Yes, let me slap that.

And that’s what I appreciate about Rohr’s musing. He taps right into main line of biblical teaching when it comes to suffering – though we seldom perceive it. God participates in our suffering. In all of it. He feels each deep wound, screams in each terror, groans in each injustice more profoundly than we can begin to fathom. We groan. Creation groans. God groans."

 And maybe the knowledge of God's presence in our suffering is where we find our source of joy?

Counting Gifts, Slowing Time and Sabbath

This is a post from my personal blog this week. Thought I would share:

Last week we talked about how slowing down enough to notice the gifts in our lives may actually make us feel like we have MORE time. We constantly feel like we don't have the time to stop, notice, and give thanks. And, yet, when we do, we feel somehow as though we've done more, lived more...in fact, had more time. 

Ecclesiastes 4:6 says, "Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind."

Abraham Joshua Heschel said,

"One who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal of embezzling his own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man."

"The world has already been created..." I cracked a smile at this. Do we really somehow think that everything will cease if we cease our toil? "Better is a handful of quietness..." Why?

I think that when we stop we recognize who we are and who God is. We see that our work will never be done, and yet, that is just fine because God created this whole world for us, and the world is held in existence by God. It is all held together by God. Our work matters, yes. But our connection with God and with each other matters more. When we are quiet, we see God...in creation, in the people around us, in the gifts we have dared to count. And then we can go about our work, mindful of those things.

This practice of quiet, of mindfulness, of ceasing toil isn't easy, I think. So, God made it mandatory. Among the ten commandments we find, "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy." (Exodus 20:8) Holy means set apart. We set this day aside. "...the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it, you shall not do any work..." (Exodus 20:10)

The Sabbath Manifesto project (a non-sectarian project, by the way) says it this way:

"Way back when, God said, 'On the seventh day thou shalt rest.'  The meaning behind it was simple: Take a break. Call a timeout. Find some balance. Recharge."

"Somewhere along the line, however, this mantra for living faded from modern consciousness. The idea of unplugging every seventh day now feels tragically close to impossible. Who has time to take time off? We need eight days a week to get tasks accomplished, not six."

Blogger and former YWAM missionary, Andrew Odom, puts it this way,

"We are destroying every sense of our being by not observing a day of rest. Remember the tortoise and the hair? There is a reason we run faster and work harder, but only fall farther behind. Our lives are too hurried, too full, and subsequently too out of balance."

We are not very good at stopping, but it is only in the stopping that we are restored. In the words of Rabbi Wolpe:

"Shabbat means stopping. Pursuit slows and ceases; grasping and getting are no longer our aim. The world still spins but we do not. Balance is restored. We give ourselves a day to celebrate God's giving us a world. Flash and dazzle dim. Meaning slowly ripens. As the poet wrote, peace comes dropping slow. Shabbat Shalom."

Strangely enough, the practice of Shabbat seems to free me all week long. Yes, my work is more productive when I have rested. But, somehow, greater productivity does not equal more frazzled and hurried. Stepping out of the toil once a week teaches me to step into the moments of daily life. And there I can count my thousands of gifts...

Gratitude Journals and Research

From Ann Voskamp's blog: A Holy Experience:

Researchers studying those who kept gratitude journals concluded:

At the end of the 10 weeks, participants who’d kept a gratitude journal felt better about their lives as a whole and were more optimistic about the future than participants in either of the other two conditions. To put it into numbers, according to the scale we used to calculate well-being, they were a full 25 percent happier than the other participants. Those in the gratitude condition reported fewer health complaints.

People who kept a gratitude journal reported feeling more joyful, enthusiastic, interested, attentive, energetic, excited, determined, and strong than those in the hassles condition. They also reported offering others more emotional support or help with a personal problem— supporting the notion that gratitude motivates people to do good. And this was not limited to what they said about themselves. We sent surveys to people who knew them well, and these significant others rated participants in the gratitude group as more helpful than those in the other groups.

A summary of findings from a University of California study on keeping gratitude journals may be found here: Gratitude and Well-Being. This is possibly the study Ann Voskamp was referring to on her blog (she posted a link, but it's outdated). If you go to the Gratitude and Well-Being link, click around on the others in the left sidebar! There's some very interesting info there!

Does Being Joyful Mean I Can't be Sad?

I found this wonderful article by Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit Priest, this morning, and it spoke to some of the questions we discussed last week.

Does Being Joyful Mean I Can't be Sad?

A quote:

So the believer must navigate between a grinning, idiotic, false happiness and carping, caterwauling, complaining mopiness. (Notice again that I’m also not speaking of clinical depression here, which more of a psychological issue.)  Overall, the believer will be happy and sad at different points of his life; but joy is possible in the midst of tragedy, since joy depends on one's faith and confidence in God.

 

To that end, one of my quotes about religion comes from the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, who contrasted “illusory” religion with “real religion.”

 

The maxim of illusory religion is:  “Fear not; trust in God and He will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you.”  

 

Real religion, said Macmurray, has a different maxim: “Fear not; the things that you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of.” 

Happiness vs. Joy

As we begin our study of One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are, I have been compelled to think about the difference between happiness and joy. Voskamp challenges us to live a life of thanksgiving. She connects thanksgiving to joy and joy to to living fully right where we are.

I got to thinking about the plethora of literature that's been generated in recent years about happiness. A website called Happiness Club lists the top 20 books on happiness. Amazon and Goodreads both have lists and lists of books about Happiness. I've read a few of them myself. Most notably, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, where I learned that Happiness is about learning to simplify, organize my closets, and have more fun. Clearly, we live in a culture where we are longing for something. We call it Happiness, but I'm convinced we are really after Joy...because we are after something that can only come from outside ourselves...ultimately, God.

For an interesting little read on the Greek words for Happiness & Joy, check out this article: Joy or Happiness?

Happiness is the great feeling that you get when everything is going smoothly. Joy is what God gives you in the midst of trouble when you put that trouble in God's hands. Both happiness and joy have no fear. Happiness has no fear because nothing is wrong, and everything is on course. Joy has no fear because we have become willing to trust God that our suffering is serving a purpose -- a purpose that we have come to want more than anything else. Another way we might put it is that we have happiness BECAUSE of our situation, we have joy IN SPITE OF our situation. With happiness, fear and destruction might be just around the corner. With joy, the very things that others fear have become, in God's hands, a means of salvation. Fear, the greatest weapon of evil, has lost its power. It's what the Cross is all about.