Surprised by Joy
When have you touched heaven? Not just sensed, but felt it so close that if it was made of material stuff you’d have it in your grasp.
One time, the Boise Phil (including my sister🎉) performed the Dvorak Cello Concerto with Zuill Bailey. His skills, passion, and silky chocolate hair was a bit of heaven in and of itself, though I didn’t get to touch it. However, nothing compared to the last two minutes of the entire piece. Master Dvorak metaphorically burst the doors of heaven wide open with a glorious invitation into God’s arms. I could feel myself rising up and being, not greeted, but absolutely consumed by Love, Wholeness, and Paradise. I wept.
In a previous post, I described a somewhat similar experience watching West Side Story in the theater. The colors! The dancing/ music/talent! I used words like transcendent, joy, and heaven! I used lots of !!! And I wept.
One time–okay five times, I had a baby and each newborn face I looked into radiated Divinity back at me. A new and holier love.
One time, I read the last pages of East of Eden and hearing Adam say, well actually I’ll stop. Everyone should experience the last few pages for themselves…after the first 600 of course. But unsurprisingly at this point, I burst into tears. Sublime.
Every time I’ve heard Shostokovich’s 2nd piano concerto I’ve cried. It’ll be my first tattoo–the whole score. I’m saving up! Mom stop crying, I’m joking. When my son performed it with the Magic Valley Symphony, even the air around me was different and magical.
One especially broken time, alone by my bed I hit a new low. Consumed by literal and figurative darkness, I was wrecked and wracked and harrowed up with emotional pain(to borrow from Alma). My failures and sins overtook me. But a pinprick of hope pierced through. One teardrop of joy. You are loved. You are mine. Was God telling me that? Was it me feeding a delusion in order to cope? I don't know. And what is this gloomy tale doing amidst my otherwise levitating post? It has more in common than meets the crying eye-crying being the operative word here.
Isn’t all joy infused with deep aching? All joy is a surprise. In fact, I don't think it can be joy without pang and pain.
In the Dvorak, before the soul rises to heaven, it’s because the heartbeat on Earth stopped. In the music, you can hear it slowing down and eventually flatlining. It’s devastating. West Side Story is archetypally and Shakespearingly the very definition of tragic. But then there’s also forgiveness and feuds ending. It’s unexpected joy!
The first 600 pages of East of Eden are so fraught with misery, many a person can’t finish the thing. But oh how they are missing out!
The Shostokovich is a Hero’s journey (home, adventure–otherwise known as "everything going horribly wrong", home). And watching grown-up Ethan, it was more apparent than ever that this once newborn is leaving me. We are not one any longer.
Giving birth was physically the hardest thing I have done. And for an eternity of a moment, approaching heaven came not from bliss but because I was surely at death’s door, so I irrationally thought. But rationality does not reign in the crowning moments of child labor.
Even in my first kisses, you might say I had lost my childhood, never to return to the sweet summer of my youth. Totally kidding, but it’s possible the last first kiss was a deeper happiness as I have lived long enough to know how south it can all go. But to find connection in all this broken dumpster fire of a world? Surprise! Joy!
CS Lewis described joy as an insatiable desire or a sharp, wonderful, Stab of Longing. He also compared it to a hummingbird to its nectar. Fleeting, fast, gone. But even this unsatisfied longing is paradoxically more satisfying than any of our earthly attempts at happiness.
Richard Rohr says “The deepest human need and longing is to overcome the separateness, the distance from what always seems ‘over there’ and ‘beyond me’ like a perfect lover, a moment of perfection in art, music, or dance, and surely a transcendent God.”
All of my described moments were exactly that-a longing to bridge the gap of my muddy existence to some kind of perfection, wholeness, and oneness. This is what we’re all after. And yet it’s so hard to ascend. The Good News is God De-scended. Richard Rohr goes on to say that the message of the Condescension is that Christ meets us here. He came to the mud in Jerusalem and is still with us always because He is in us. It’s how we were built-a divine spark is at the core of each of us. Things need not be so over there, separate, after all.
The grief in you crying out, the longing for something is the God in you longing for the God at Home. Rohr called it our homing device. So often we look for big moments or big things to reach the Divine. So often it can be found in the hard, hurting, and boring every day.
At midnight the would-be ascetic announced:
“This is the time to give up my home and seek for God. Ah, who has held me so long in delusion here?”
God whispered, “I,” but the ears of the man were stopped.
With a baby asleep at her breast lay his wife, peacefully sleeping on one side of the bed.
The man said, “Who are ye that have fooled me so long?”
The voice said again, “They are God,” but he heard it not.
The baby cried out in its dream, nestling close to its mother.
God commanded, “Stop, fool, leave not thy home,” but still he heard not.
God sighed and complained, “Why does my servant wander to seek me, forsaking me?”
—Rabindranath Tagore
Rob Bell pointed out that joy never ignores grief and pain but goes right through the heart of it through to the other side to wonder and awe. Yes, life is even worse than you think-- and yet! There’s magic everywhere if we just look.
Earth’s crammed with Heaven and every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
You really should write a book! Several!
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