14 September 2024 Joy
- quietspacesplymout
- Jan 23, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: Feb 3, 2025
Welcome, and opening prayer by Janet
‘Our theme today is joy. We will be drawing from various authors including the incredible meeting of Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama in 2015, where they showed that it was indeed possible to experience joy whilst suffering ourselves and witnessing suffering in others.
I can recommend the book that came from this meeting - ‘The Book of Joy’ by His Holiness The Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It is available in book form, Kindle and Audible on Amazon
The Little Book of Joy
Joy is the warm tingly feeling of the sun tickling your toes in the morning.
It's the giggly, squiggly feeling when you are doing something silly.
Even when you wake to the rain and your joy is washed away, it's waiting at the bottom of the puddle ….. Joy is never far away. Even in hard times, joy never truly disappears. And when we share our joy with others, it grows inside us.
His Holiness The Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Rafael López, The Little Book of Joy,
Desmond Tutu
“The joy that you are talking about is not just a feeling. It’s not something that just comes and goes. It’s something much more profound….. Many people are waiting for happiness or joy. When they get a job, when they fall in love, when they get rich, then they will be happy, then they will have joy. You are talking about something that is available right now, without waiting for anything. I mean simply to say that ultimately our greatest joy is when we seek to do good for others.”
Desmond Tutu continues with how are made to be compassionate and need community and the interactions of other humans. He rather humorously refers to the story of Adam and Eve. He states:
‘God says, ‘It is not good for Adam to be alone.’ Well, you could have said, ‘No, I’m sorry, he’s not alone. I mean, there are trees, there are animals, and there are the birds. How can you say he’s alone?’ “And you realize that in a very real sense we’re meant for a very profound complementarity.’ Adam needed another human being. Archbishop Tutu then looks at how we ‘pour out our hearts’ and help strangers. We see this with our affinity with children in Gaza, Ukraine and the West Bank – with the aid and of course hours of knitting done to send to Ukraine.
In Africa there is the concept of Ubuntu which says: ‘A person is a person through other persons. Ubuntu says when I have a small piece of bread, it is for my benefit that I share it with you.’
Finally, Archbishop Tutu states: “This God is community, and fellowship. Being created by this God, we are created in order to flourish. And we flourish in community. We are made to be a reservoir of joy, an oasis of peace, a pool of serenity that can ripple out to all those around you.” So it would seem we are made to be compassionate with a need for fellow humans, with our greatest joy is seeking good for others
Lama, Dalai; Tutu, Desmond. The Book of Joy (p. 59-63). Random House. Kindle Edition.
You could not stop it
if you tried--
how this blessing
begins to sing
every time it sees
your face,
how it turns itself
in wonder
merely at the mention
of your name.
It is simply
how joy works,
going out to you
when you least expect,
running up to meet you
when you had not thought
to ask.
Jan Richardson
The Other Side of Sorrow
WE ALL HOPE FOR HAPPINESS. MANY WOULD SAY it is their birthright, to be happy. Happiness sometimes lies on the roadside of our lives, easily gathered in parcels of pleasure. But joy is a rarer treasure and often lies only on the other side of sorrow, just as the sweetest fruits often grow on the other side of the thorn hedge. Maybe happiness can even be a barrier in our search for deeper joy—a seductive cul-de-sac that can tempt us to settle for less, when God longs to give us more.
Silf, Margaret. Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn (p. 214). Loyola Press. Kindle Edition.
Stillness and Quiet
Sharing
Janet, the Pastor at Roborough Methodist Church wrote the following poem during the stillness and is happy for it to be shared with you. She wrote this during the 30 minute silence - amazing!
Quiet Gazing on an Autumn Morning
The sun’s brightness above the trees
It’s rays shining through the leaves
Tiny insects – flying in patterns – caught in the sun’s rays.
Their flights indeterminate, all going different ways.
Now the sun catches a spider’s web,
And spider’s yarn reaching from bush to bush.
Now holly leaves reflecting the light, shining like fallen stars.
Leaves on the trees, thousands and thousands of leaves
Just moving in the gentle breeze
Then, suddenly, birdsong – beautiful - completing the wonder
And I was full of joy.
Janet Dobinson, 14th September 2024
Blessing
For Equilibrium, a Blessing:
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.
As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.
Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.
As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.
Karen As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.
As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.
May your prayer of listening deepen enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of god.”
John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
Thoughts To Ponder
Matthew 13:44 - The Parables of the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl
44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”
1 Peter 1:8-9 "Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls."
Psalm 84:6 “Who passing through the vale of tears makes it a well.”
Lama, Dalai; Tutu, Desmond. The Book of Joy (p. 92). Random House. Kindle Edition.
John 15:11: "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full"
William Blake said, “He who binds to himself a joy, does the winged life destroy, he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity’s sunrise.” Blake is instructing us to love the joy while it is here, even as it dissolves into something new. If we do not cling to our joy, we can be all the more intimate with it while it is here.
I Call it Joy
“I call it Joy. 'Animal-Land' was not imaginative. But certain other experiences were... The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult or find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?...Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse... withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased... In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else... The quality common to the three experiences... is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again... I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.”
C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Desmond Tutu
“Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.”
Lama, Dalai; Tutu, Desmond. The Book of Joy (p. 12). Random House. Kindle Edition.
Choosing Joy
I am convinced we can choose joy. Every moment we decide to respond to an event or a person with joy instead of sadness. When we truly believe that God is life and only life….. To choose joy does not mean to choose happy feelings or an artificial atmosphere of hilarity. But it does mean the determination to let whatever takes place bring us one step closer to the God of life.
Maybe this is what is so important about quiet moments of meditation and prayer. They allow me to take a critical look at my moods and to move from victimization to free choice.
Henri Nouwen, https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/choosing-joy-2/
Joy in the Spirit
Holy joy is one of the most common marks of those who walk in the power of the Spirit, and Francis and his merry band possessed it in abundance. Their joy must have been a wonder to watch; just reading about it quickens the heart. These young troubadours of the Lord went from town to town, inebriated with holy joy. Even when Francis stood in front of the pope, he all but danced. Thomas of Celano wrote of this event noting that Francis “spoke with such great fervor of spirit, that, not being able to contain himself for joy … he moved his feet as though he were dancing.
Foster, Richard. Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith . John Murray Press. Kindle Edition.
Thich Nhat Hanh
“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
The Gift of Deficiency
Silf, Margaret. Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn (p. 140). Loyola Press. Kindle Edition.
Sunken Treasure
Silf, Margaret. Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn (p. 173). Loyola Press. Kindle Edition.
“All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still 'about to be'.”
C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life,
A Blessing for Presence
John O’Donohue, (1998). Eternal Echoes. Exploring our hunger to belong Bantam Books. p.139
CS Lewis
When we are crushed like grapes
Henri Nouwen https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/joy/
Question to Desmond Tutu
Desmond Tutu was asked how he maintained joy in the face of suffering.
Lama, Dalai; Tutu, Desmond. The Book of Joy (p. 43). Random House. Kindle Edition.
Joy is seeing the sacred in the mundane
KG
Euan's "happiness"
"Happiness holds; as long as you hold happiness in your heart."
Euan
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