Joy is a little word: three letters, one syllable. It is luminous. It is impenetrable. It is a word that offers much, if it doesn’t slip out of your hand. For some, joy is elitist, out of touch. How could any rational person find joy when the daily intake of news warrants nothing but outcry and despondency? But such a sentiment is, while understandable, only half-considered; joy should be given its due.
Joy is the mother tongue of faith. It is the pagination of Holy Writ. Given that, it seems almost a necessity to get a sense of joy’s relation to God. Frustratingly, joy is allergic to demarcation. A cheap definition is all too easy to spot. How then to proceed? I’m convinced prose will only get us so far. Better is poetry. It’s equipped for the task; its form is a friend and a guide.
By poetry, I have in mind two bodies of work. First, the book of Psalms. Psalms has been called the church’s hymnbook, the “little Bible,” and a “mirror of the soul.” Seems like a good place to start. The second grouping of poetry comes from a volume edited by Christian Wiman, titled Joy (Yale University Press, 2019). Over the last year, in my attempt to make some sense of joy, these poems have been close. On my desk. Beside my bed. In my mind. On my lips. I read these poems because I’m naïve enough to think that joy is possible. That joy and faith somehow rhyme. And that they do so without making either of them a cheap commodity.
The basics. How do we define joy? Can we define joy? A poem by Yehuda Amichai sets the stage:
The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy. I’m thinking
how precise people are when they describe their pain in a doctor’s office.
Even those who haven’t learned to read and write are precise:
“This one’s a throbbing pain, that one’s a wrenching pain, this one gnaws, that one burns, this is a sharp pain
and that—a dull one. Right here. Precisely here, yes, yes.” Joy blurs everything. I’ve heard people say after nights of love and feasting, “It was great,
I was in seventh heaven.” Even the spaceman who floated
in outer space, tethered to a spaceship, could say only, “Great, wonderful, I have no words.”
The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain—
I want to describe, with a sharp pain’s precision, happiness and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.
Any attempt at a definition will prove difficult, if not disappointing. The dictionaries corroborate with their deflating and unimaginative gloss of “strong happiness.” As unhelpful as the professionals are here (and they are unhelpful), it may be because joy is blurry; it resists two- word descriptions.
There are hints of the blurriness of joy in Psalm 126, which reads:
When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then they said among the nations,
“The LORD has done great things for them.”
The LORD has done great things for us;
we are glad.
Joy settles comfortably in the context of restoration, with pain and suffering in past tense. This dreamlike joy lacks a certain conscious clarity; it is felt.
Blurred joy spills over into an effusive non-sequitur in Psalm 4:
You have put more joy in my heart
than they have when their grain and wine abound.
The quantity of joy is innumerable, unable to be reported. Its quality can only be described by analogy, in this case to the abundant pleasures of grain and wine. Thus, scientific precision can’t hold onto joy (which I find to be positive, rather than negative).
In Psalm 43, after calling for God to send out his light and truth, the poet says:
Then I will go to the altar of God,
to God, my exceeding joy,
and I will praise you with the lyre, O God, my God.
Joy is not easily weighed and measured. Neither is God.
When it comes to paradox, poetry has no peer; its economy of expression provides opportunity. Read, for example, Pablo Medina’s “A Poem For the Epiphany,” which begins with a quote from Goethe.
Ach, wie anders, wie schön Lebt der Himmel, lebt die Erde
It snows because the door to heaven is open, because God is tired of working
and the day needs to be left alone.
Because the rich man cannot buy snow
and the poor man has to wear it on his eyebrows because it makes the old dog think
his life has just begun. He runs
back and forth across the parking lot.
silence covers sound, sleep covers sorrow,
everything is death, everything is joy.
The last line presses against the superficial. Seemingly contradictory, each everything makes sense of the other. The line is an intelligible enigma. I lean into the poem, wishing it will tell me more. Poetry opens me up to the paradox of life. Poetry hurls me back to reality; it’s simply too easy to trade the complexity of joy for the simplicity of modern happiness.
Or take Richard Wilbur’s poem “Hamlen Brook”:
Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake, Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.
Joy moves effortlessly between being undesirable and utterly desirable; the joyful one is satisfied and insatiable.
In similar fashion, Psalm 113 celebrates this mystery: the joyful are not those with power or means; they are those who lack, whose lips were dry:
Who is like the LORD our God, who is seated on high,
who looks far down
on the heavens and the earth?
He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people.
He gives the barren woman a home,
making her the joyous mother of children.
Praise the LORD!
And so, Wilbur may be right that nothing can satisfy. But the Psalter gives us the words of the God who is incomparable. The joy received in need redounds, bringing forth praise. Indeed, no-thing can satisfy. And knowing that, it’s hard not to breathe a sigh of relief. Blessed are the meek and merciful.
Joy draws us in. It pulls on us. But even as we relish joy, pain is not absent, which is reassuring, if also irritating. Denise Levertov’s “The Ache of Marriage” reads:
It is leviathan and we in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside of it
two by two in the ark of the ache of it.
In the Psalms, too, the desire of joy has reference to suffering. Take, for example, Psalm 42:
My tears have been my food day and night,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”
These things I remember, as I pour out my soul:
how I would go with the throng
and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise,
a multitude keeping festival.
While eating tears, the memory of joy crowds out other prayers. The poet looks back with desire and looks forward with expectation. I’m left to question what I do when suffering sets in.
Not all are satisfied by this cross-grained experience of glad shouts and tears of anguish. The following poem by Robinson Jeffers, “Joy,” is just one example:
Though joy is better than sorrow joy is not great;
Peace is great, strength is great.
Not for joy the stars burn, not for joy the vulture
Spreads her gray sails on the air
Over the mountain; not for joy the worn mountain Stands, while years like water
Trench his long sides. “I am neither mountain nor bird Nor star; and I seek joy.”
The weakness of your breed: yet at length quietness Will cover those wistful eyes.
Joy may draw us in, but according to Jeffers, it’s part of the impermanence of humanity. As such, longing for joy is a second order desire; perhaps it’s even to be pitied, more a ‘bug’ than a ‘feature’ of humanity’s pre-programmed software. Or. . . what if it’s not? What if Jeffers has it wrong? What if joy is divinely designed as a definitive feature of humanity? What if joy outlasts our bodies as we return to dust? What if joy is all that resurrected bones will ever know?
Joy is episodic. The poem “Vacillation” by W. B. Yeats bears witness to this fact:
My fiftieth year had come and gone, I saw, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessèd and could bless.
The opening line of a poem by Thylias Moss puts the question perfectly:
How will we get used to joy
if we don’t hold onto it?
The last stanza of the poem reads:
Joy
is at our tongue tips: let the great thirsts and hungers
of the world be the marvelous thirsts, glorious hungers.
Let heartbreak be alternative to coffeebreak, five
midmorning minutes devoted to emotion.
Joy is embodied; it is pitched. All the same, it is brief. Similarly, Psalm 90 recognizes the temporal realities of joy, but the poet bids for balance between suffering and gladness (which I’ve always considered quite bold):
The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.
So teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
and for as many years as we have seen evil.
Joy is not taken as a given. Gladness comes on account of God. And so we pray. The brevity of joy isn’t stretched out by our species striving harder; rather, the duration of gladness is a divine gift.
The joy of non-human creatures is sensible and certain. Perhaps the best example comes from the poem “Blackbird Etude” by A. E. Stallings:
The blackbird sings at the frontier of his music. The branch where he sat.
marks the brink of doubt, is the outpost of his realm, edge from which to rout
encroachers with trills and melismatic runs sur- passing earthbound skills.
It sounds like ardor,
it sounds like joy. We are glad
here at the border
where he signs the air with his invisible staves,
TRESPASSERS BEWARE—
song as survival—
a kind of pure music which we cannot rival.
Similar to Stallings is Psalm 96:
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
let the field exult, and everything in it!
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy
before the LORD, for he comes, for he comes to judge the earth.
Loud. Boisterous. Bold. Creation is a creature whose joy is directed toward its Creator. In the Psalter, this truth is common ground, but for many today it’s like listening to driving directions in a language you don’t understand. The poetry of Scripture gives much needed clarity that the earth, the sea, the field, and the forest are a choir that is continually singing. Instead of pretending that creation is only for our greed and gluttony, perhaps we should hold our ear in the air and listen to the music?
Hardly any modern political group can make sense of creation’s melody. But poetry can. And that makes me smile.
Joy is an answer, either to someone or something. Read, for example, the poem “An Old Cracked Tune” by Stanley Kunitz:
The sands whispered, Be separate,
the stones taught me, Be hard.
I dance, for the joy of surviving, On the edge of the road.
The poet of Psalm 66 is prompted by God’s actions in the world:
Come and see what God has done:
he is awesome in his deeds toward humanity.
He turned the sea into dry land;
they passed through the river on foot.
There did we rejoice in him.
Psalm 92 follows a similar path of answering God with delight:
For you, O LORD, have made me glad by your work; at the works of your hands I sing for joy.
Reading this poem, I get it. I’m called to attention. And it’s from that attention that I can get to singing. But recognizing that God has done something in the world seems altogether impossible if I’m scrolling through memes and pictures of what people had for dinner last night.
Praise is fitting for those who have received the sure and steady love of the Lord. Anything else fits like a father in his forties wearing his most beloved t-shirt from high school. It’s just not quite right.
Joy is a tiny but robust word. Easy to say, difficult to define. Nonetheless, the poets above have offered words of life, words of joy; their poetry provides a path for considering and imbibing joy.
Joy is a divine resource. Which is to say, the God of my exceeding joy; the God who gives joy to the humble, the lowly, the needy. Joy is a memory, a time in the past that welcomed more laughter than sorrow, a memory of benevolence. Joy is God-given, but it is not a steady state.
Joy is in a way ineffable and inscrutable. It is somehow a sacrifice. It is somehow expressed by both the community and creation. Joy is good. Perhaps we should consider it not despite but because of the endless news cycle. Talking heads and partisanship demand simple emotions, such as rage, hate, and resentment. Joy complexifies the simple logic of our attention economy. Joy doesn’t ignore the all-too-common reactive and unmoored emotions, but joy isn’t overshadowed by them, either. Joy rises above. And of course, joy goes whence it came. Or put differently, if faith in God is paradoxical, then surely the most reasonable thing to do in an age of outrage and anxiety is to long for joy.
Image Credit: Sir Edward John Poynter “Wooded Landscape” (c1900)
