I begin most days with a walk, often in the woods. While Zuki(my dog) follows her nose dashing about I list my blessings in a litany of gratitude. On the days when brilliant blue sky frames the unfurling leaves it’s impossible not to revel in the grace of the world. The woods are such a lovely antidote to human news. The way life teems among branches, fallen or standing, the scrub brush chattering around my ankles.
On Monday’s walk, overcome with delight at the shape of my life now, I recalled how I used to feel immobilized by the vast suffering in the world. How, I wondered, could I go about my plentiful life in the presence of so much need. In the midst of my fretting about what I could not do, could not solve and could not save, a friend asked, “What would it mean to answer the call to joy?”
I wasn’t sure I understood the question so I wrote it on a memo board. Daily, I pondered how my friend had phrased her question. She didn’t say, “What would mean to be happy?” She didn’t ask what it would mean to be content or satisfied. She asked what it would mean to answer the call to joy.
The language of call is religious: the sound of the cosmos itself summoning us to something important, taking up a particular vocation or form of service. And since answering a call suggests a religious experience, I began to wonder how that relates to joy. What makes it a calling? Is joy a religious experience? And how do we recognize joy in the midst of a world blighted by suffering, in a culture preoccupied with happiness?
The 13th century Sufi poet Rumi writes: “Keep knocking and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look to see who’s there.” This suggests joy dwells deep within. It doesn’t float on the surface, like oil atop a rain-slickened road. It doesn’t come free in the cereal box or with a scratch card for the lottery. It takes its own time, and sometimes the path it travels tastes of sorrow, or regret.
For many of us, true joy arises in the shadow of difficulty or at least challenge. While pleasure may derive from momentary sensation, and happiness may bloom out of satisfaction or mirth, joy travels through fertile darkness to reach the light. It has a depth that resonates. Perhaps that’s one way we can recognize it: by the vibration we feel at the core of our being.
To feel that vibration can be its own joy particularly in the presence of suffering. On my Monday walk as I offered a prayer for all the beings in peril, I contemplated the magnitude of life. Gazillions of beings—how every moment some tender shoot gets stepped on, insects get crushed, (at the second I typed that line I looked down and saw a tick crawling on my keyboard cable and sadly, I squished it. The universe underscores the veracity of its truths.) Every minute somewhere on earth people and animals die horrible deaths; rivers and plants, and marine creatures choke on our toxins. Suffering is indeed the marrow and if the great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh is right that suffering engenders compassion and thus who would want to live in a world without it, it makes no sense to pray that all suffering cease. Even if we want it to, it won’t. But it occurs to me that we are called to notice the suffering and in so doing, in that sharp intake of breath— the sigh we emit in the face of suffering becomes part of the song.
Joy is not a solution to suffering but it is a response.
To quote Rumi again, “An eye is meant to see things. The soul is here for its own joy.”
Over the last twenty-plus years, I have taught and volunteered in prisons. Buildings with little or no natural light. Drab monochrome, layers of frustration cemented by anger, sometimes encased in despair. I have passed through the electronically operated doors into concrete slab rooms, bearing as much color as I could. Paper, fabric, words. Any medium would do. When I taught at the women’s prison in New Hampshire in the early nineties, I invited women to tell stories or to find themselves in someone else’s. We studied literature and change, and in moments unobserved, we abetted transformation. One afternoon, after I’d read “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver, I asked the women in class what it would mean for them to dare to be happy; one responded by saying, “They hate for us to be happy in here.” It’s hard to be happy in prison. Very little merriment. Few sources of pleasure. Restricted access to comfort or solace. But the women in that class taught me about joy.
Another day, a group of women gathered with my friend Jen, who’d brought in plaster masks and lots of art supplies. Markers, paint, beads, sequins, forbidden feathers. The superintendent came in, pulled me aside and threatened: “If I find one feather in anyone’s cell, you’re never coming back.” As soon as she left I said, “ Is she afraid someone might tickle herself? and Gigi quickly answered, “That’s exactly right.”
In an institution intended to dehumanize, fifteen women decorated masks that revealed themselves. In telling each other about the masks they made, they inhabited a space made precious by their being. They weren’t allowed to keep the masks but they made them anyway, because the process of creating them gave those women a way to answer the call to joy.
One need not enter a prison to find joy, but one need not confine prison to the kind with razor wire and correctional officers. Consider the prisons we may inhabit: Shame, guilt, dishonesty, self-doubt, addiction, unresolved anger. Someone else’s shoulds. Achievement defined by another’s values. Believing joy belongs to someone else. Rumi instructs us to “Become the sky/ Take an ax to that prison wall—escape/ Walk out like someone suddenly born into color./ Do it now.”
Keep knocking.
After a long day of university teaching, I would drive to the women’s prison, often weary, sometimes depressed, on a spiritual journey I did not yet recognize. There, women taught me how to find freedom within constraint. Women who laughed with me and shared the intimacy of silence. Women who read aloud and let themselves feel the vibration of collective voices. Women who hung their vibrant masks on the classroom bulletin board as if to say, “Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.” Seeing that wall of masks and knowing what went into making them and leaving them behind, filled my throat with tears. One night, under a waxing moon, I scribbled as I drove home,
The silver throated orchid
grows sideways
reaching toward light,
undaunted by low ceilings,
it sings out the window
to sweet peas climbing by,
trailing arpeggios across the roof
serenading the great orange moon
rising into sky.
Like a cake pulled too early,
the top edge of the moon is gone,
sweetness collecting in the dark.
Dig your hands deep
and plant your own lullaby.
Harvest your dreams
and sleep well
knowing what can flourish
in the slice of invisible moon.
What spilled out as a poem came from the wellspring of joy I had witnessed and experienced, a joy that answered the knocking and opened the barred window to see who was there.
I used to question whether it’s right in a world so ravaged to experience joy. Considering all the travail and heartbreak, contemplating what it means to read Bon Appétit in a world where tens of thousands die each day of hunger and a billion people lack clean water. When I hear of yet another senseless death, it’s easy to cast aside joy. But then I remember what the dead and dying ask of the living is to embrace life, to let the sigh become part of the song.
Inside the fullness of life the comic and tragic, the complex and breathtakingly simple co-exist. Joy is part of the paradox. New lives enter the world as others lay dying. During winter, when trees appear bare, inside they are re-inventing spring. The devastation of earthquakes and tornadoes, the machinations of war, the assault of terror anywhere insist that we listen harder for the vibration of joy. Perhaps that’s why I love the woods, where I feel the hum of existence, the living and the dying commingled, inviting me into the thrum of being.
On my walks I engage of a litany of gratitude because frankly, I am overcome with the breadth of my good fortune. Understanding the way my life—and perhaps yours—reflects the gift of feeling held. Even in the uncertainty that all life involves, some lives, like mine, center on trust.
We don’t enter this building warily, looking over our shoulders thinking someone might gun us down. We don’t suspect newcomers of infiltrating to turn us in to the secret police. We don’t live under tyranny. We don’t dodge landmines or roving gangs of militia as some do. We have the good fortune to be open to the possibility of grace, to lead lives that afford the possibility of trust, even faith.
For years I have spoken of a benevolent universe. The benevolence isn’t tied to a lack of suffering; it arises out of a demanding joy. Joy that bears the cost of mindfulness: the awareness that all life entwines, all sorrow springs from the same cosmic pool; hardship and hazard anywhere affect the thrum of life everywhere.
Our joy affects the whole planet, too.
Recently, I spent the day at in the medium security unit of the men’s prison in Shirley, Massachusetts, co-facilitating a workshop on Alternatives to Violence. In an exercise called Concentric Circles we paired up and had two minutes each to answer the question, “What’s something you’ve let go of in the last year?” Immediately I answered, “Self-imposed constraints.” Leaving our self-made prisons frees us to answer the call to joy.
What makes joy demanding is that leaving prison takes courage. Any incarcerated person will tell you that. After Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they reached a point where they wanted to go back. But if we are willing to take an ax to the prison walls we construct, if we are willing in the midst of suffering and grief to respond to our soul’s stirring, if we allow ourselves to feel the thrum of life vibrating within, we can answer the call to joy.
While hope calls us back from the brink of despair by inviting us to imagine a different time, reality or place, joy summons us to inhabit this moment, already ripe. Joy calls to us in our uncertainty and offers itself within the very garden of our limitation. It does not depend on material possessions or success. It does even require happiness. It emerges when we risk revealing ourselves by naming our masks. It relies on our capacity to connect with what matters, to notice the pulse of existence that binds us to all being.
This is why joy is a religious experience. It not about singularity of a religious tradition or institution. Joy cares not if you are Sufi, pagan, humanist, Jew. It cares not if you are Christian or Hindu or Buddhist or animist. It doesn’t even care if you say, “I’m spiritual, not religious.” It cares only that you keep knocking. That you engage with life on life’s terms, that you take an ax to the prison wall that confines your soul. Joy expresses life’s longing for itself.
“Keep knocking,” Rumi writes, “and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look to see who’s there.” Will it be you?
Amen.
