Pathways to Joy
Friday, June 20, 2025
Dr. Barbara Holmes describes how we can find joy through practice and surrender:
Joy is a choice. Our lives are so short; to live with joy seems to be a no-brainer. Why waste time on issues that we can’t control? Your body holds memories of both joyful and difficult moments in your life. Think about something that made you angry, and your body will supply the distress and angst to go with the memory. Think about joy and happy moments in your life, and your whole body smiles. Joy offers a peace that surpasses all understanding. Once you experience joy, once you find those inner pathways, it leaves markers toward those inner resources so that you never lose sight of them again….
So, how do we foster embodied presence and joy? I believe we do it through practice and through meditation. Left to your own devices, the natural state of the human brain is a wandering and critical mind. Meditation helps bring that chaos into a more peaceful state. If it’s difficult, begin with sitting in silence. Let your mind do what it wants before slowly bringing it into the present moment. Use music if it helps. The second thing I would suggest is to awaken to the joy in nature. Purposely pay attention to sunsets and sunrises, to the sounds of nature, and other expressions of joy in the environment. Third, I would suggest that you develop an appreciation for the everyday graces, the sound of children playing, the traffic that won’t let us get home when we want to but allows a pause in our frenetic going.
Fourth, I would suggest that we begin to ritualize transitions, such as births and deaths, transitions from child to teenager, and from teen to adult. Mark these events as special moments of joy. You may be surprised at the numbers of incidents of joy during the ritualization of sad occasions. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Be peace,” I’m suggesting that we “Be joy.” You may not feel it, but embody it. Live it. Smile it. Is that being fake? I don’t think so. I think it’s holding space for the joy already given and received that you may not be aware of yet. It’s helping your body to express an inner state of being.
Finally, don’t forget the power of community to create spaces of joy when you cannot engender the joy yourself. That joy comes during worship, during fellowship, and even during crisis. Civil rights workers found their joy in music as they came together. I’ve always said, the greatest antidote to depression and oppression is joy. There’s joy coming together of one accord. In the upper room, preparing to grieve the loss of the Savior on Calvary, suddenly there are tongues of fire and joy with the impartation of the Holy Spirit. When you feel alone, look at those who are with you in the struggle, and those who have gone before. No matter the circumstances, it was community that empowered the justice movements in this country and in others. It was a momentum of like minds focused and trusting in God that gave activists the energy to face their fears.
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John Chaffee Five on Friday
1.
“Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.”
– Psalm 139:7-10, Ancient Hebrew Spiritual
This is one of the most famous passages in the entire Bible about the universal presence of God, also known as the “omnipresence of God.”
What strikes me about this passage is that there is nowhere we can go that God is not already.
For many, the Gospel is that humanity once had union with God, became separated from God, and therefore must seek to be reunited with God (or do X, Y, or Z to make God willing to be reunited with us). This approach leaves many with uncertainty, anxiety, and an unfulfilled trust that God will still want to be reunited with us.
As a result of that traumatic assumption of disconnection, we fall into grave sin and self-destructive habits to distract or numb ourselves from that assumption.
BUT…
If we were always with God, even amid our rebellion, and that God was not willing to ever allow something to separate us from the love of God, then the Gospel is reframed as “In Jesus, God is always intimately and infinitely present with and to us, and that no amount of our own mistakes or missteps will ever change that reality.”
As David says in the Psalms, nothing can separate us from the presence of God, and wherever we are aware of God’s presence, we are already at the threshold of heaven.
2.
“In this [stage of spiritual maturity], the soul discovers how all things are seen in God, and how He contains all things within Himself. This is of great benefit because, even though it only lasts a moment, it remains engraved upon a soul. And it also causes great confusion in showing us more clearly the wrongness of offending God, because it’s in God Himself – I mean, while dwelling within Him – that we do all this wrong.”
– Teresa of Avila, Spanish Carmelite Reformer
One of the absurdities that flows out of the idea of the omnipresence of God is that God sustains us even as we commit terrible mistakes against ourselves and one another.
It may be part of one stage of the journey to believe that God departs from us either during or immediately after we commit a terrible act. However, Teresa of Avila teaches us that at another stage of the journey, we come to realize that God never leaves us or forsakes us, even if we act in ways contrary to health and holiness.
This is a mindboggling thought.
Moreover, Teresa is correct in that the experience of oneness with God then colors everything else we experience in life from that point forward.
3.
“There is no space where God is not; space does not exist apart from Him. He is in heaven, in hell, beyond the seas; dwelling in all things and enveloping all. Thus He embraces, and is embraced by, the universe, confined to no part of it but pervading all.”
– Hilary of Potiers, 4th Century Bishop
If anything, I believe the early Church worked out its theology in light of the omnipresence of God, rather than we today, who work out our theology in light of the semi-absence of God.
4.
“The soul that is united with God is feared by the devil as if it were God himself.”
– St. John of the Cross, Spanish Carmelite Reformer
Union with God is so complete that Paul’s words finally become true…
“I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live but Christ lives in me.” – Galatians 2:20
5.
“The notion that God is absent is the fundamental illusion of the human condition.”
– Thomas Keating, Trappist Monk
I have shared this quote before, but I recently finished Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic by Cynthia Bourgeault, and Keating has been on my mind since.
There is a joke that goes: “A Christian mystic was walking down 5th Ave in New York City and stopped at a hot dog cart. ‘Hey fella, what kind of hot dog do ya want?’ asked the vendor. The Christian mystic replied, ‘Make me one with everything.'”
Many people misunderstand the Christian mystics because of the word “mystic.” For many, the word “mystic” carries immediate baggage associated with New Age spirituality, esoteric teachings that lack grounding, and the assumption that all religions are essentially the same.
However, the Christian tradition maintains that Christian mysticism is like a central golden thread running through all the centuries and weaving its way through all the Christian denominations.
It centers on two basic tenets: a sincere devotion to Jesus of Nazareth and his teachings, and the experience of intimate oneness with the Divine.
The first tenet isn’t particularly dangerous, but the second is.
To maintain that God is intimately present in all things, in such a way that there is never separation from God, but rather the illusion of separation, causes all kinds of trouble for theologies built around the concept of separation. This is why I thought it would be interesting to share quotes this week from Scripture and Christian history that relate to union with God.
