Joyful, Anyway

"I am barely okay," my friend said tearfully, "and now you're trying to convince me that I could feel euphoric. Are you insane?!"

At that we both cracked a smile, which turned into a long stretch of making jokes about me. Wasn't I the person who recently insisted that we take a three-hour detour to visit the world's largest turtle made of spare tires? Hadn't I organized a walking contest that dislocated a friend's hip while everyone was forced to dress like Dolly Parton? Was I really to be trusted?

But I know about the joy that persists, even though it might seem like temporary insanity.

I looked at my friend, red eyes and water-stained shirt, and I could see how impossible joy felt to her. In fact, not long ago, I would not have believed in joy either. It's strange to say it like that—but I believe in joy. We can't mistake it for anything less than what it is: one of the most powerful ways we experience the deepest and most healing forms of gratitude, delight, and hope. It is a kind of transcendence; joy is a glimmer of love and forgiveness and wholeness that lifts us out of reality for a moment and gives us back to ourselves, anew.

At first, in my own life, joy appeared as an incredible reversal—I should have been devastated, but then its bright light appeared. Joy came to me like a rush of love that bubble-wrapped me for weeks at a time. It came to me a moment before surgery and every time I threw a taste-test party. Joy felt like a miracle.

But then I survived cancer and life was just life again: meetings and to-do lists and errands and follow-up appointments, wrestling an iPad away from my son and arguing with my husband about who is actually reading the endless school emails with a hidden code to log in to a magical portal that forces me to continue the educational journey until bedtime. I was languishing. I kept thinking that I should feel grateful for all of it, but mostly I felt bored, sometimes annoyed, and then, inevitably, guilty. But soon I discovered that joy is there, too—in the ordinary—if you are willing to take the chance.

 

If you ask people who have really gone through something—the people who have been wrung out from their insides and forced to act the part of normal human beings on the outside—they might tell you about joy and how there is nothing predictable about it. Sometimes, often, they were devastated, but then, curiously, there were moments that went beyond okayness. They worried that they could never be happy again but—what's that?—there it was: joy.

"There are always two preachers at a funeral." Death and Hope. That's what my friend Tom Long likes to say. There will be a body, and then there needs to be a person who stands up to tell the story about the love that goes on and on.

There will always be a body. There will always be a world on fire. Despair is a powerful preacher. But then, wait a minute, I think I hear a song.

Like birds singing.

It does not cry: Is this it?

It insists: There is more.

The newspaper headlines will agree that there is nothing worth being joyful about. Everywhere is cancer, hurricanes, stock market disasters, and teenage anxiety disorders. Let's not forget troll farms, conspiracy theories, and drone strikes. We hear the steady drumbeat of the looming apocalypse but there is so much important shrugging to be done in the meantime. A new study emerges every year documenting the sinkhole of mistrust underneath most public institutions but, fingers crossed, someone official is still testing the strength of highway bridges. Who can save us anyway when we are swimming in microplastics and forever chemicals?

It feels, argues the theologian Charles Mathewes, like we're experiencing a global withering of our capacity for joy.

But then again...

Has anyone looked closely at the eyelashes on babies? Ridiculous. I mean, useless. But delightful. Every weekend some Good Samaritans I know have been rehabbing church basements to house families who have no other place to stay. Before I fall asleep I like to replay the scene where a friend of mine competed in a well-attended dog show as a human contestant. She hit all her marks and jumped through a hoop two feet off the ground.

I have been reading Jack Gilbert poems lately and I keep returning to his classic "A Brief for the Defense," which catalogs the atrocities of the world. He lands on this stunning admission: "We must admit there will be music despite everything."

It's true. We can hear the music despite everything. And we have to sing it over and over and over again.

In the many chambers of our beating hearts are reservoirs for joy.

"You will hear the music," I said to my friend. "I swear you will hear the music."