January 08 +James Joy

Instead, he finds “something dreary and absurd”.  Reading that, I wondered which ‘believers’ he has ever met.  The ones I know – especially here in Cumbria – may not always be happy, but they have a quality of joyfulness which is deeply infectious.

That, of course, is exactly how it should be.  Joy is part of the fruit of the Spirit, and Jesus said to his disciples “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete”. (Jn 15.11).  Our joy ‘being complete’ means realising that whatever our outward circumstances, God is in control.  As William Blake put it “Joy and woe are woven fine, A clothing for the soul divine.  Under every grief and pine, Runs a joy with silken twine.”

That’s why C.S. Lewis could speak of joy as ‘Inner health made audible’ (and laughter is like internal aerobics – it quickens the heart, expands circulation, works muscles, enhances oxygen intake and boosts the immune system).  It involves seeing things in a new way, rather like an artist.  The story is told of a woman who studied one of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings and observed “I don’t see clouds that way”.  “Madam” replied Turner, “don’t you wish you could?”  As Fra Giovanni once said, “The gloom of the world is but a shadow.  Behind it, yet within reach, is joy.  There is a radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see, and to see we have only to look.  I beseech you to look.”

In other words, being joyful isn’t something that simply happens to us.  It involves a deliberate choice – which, according to Henri Nouwen, “is based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and that nothing, not even death, can take God away from us.  Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved.”

What’s more, that choice involves what St Frances used to call ‘purity of heart and devout prayer’.  According to his biographer, Francis’ ‘supreme and particular desire’ was to possess ‘an abiding joy of spirit’.  This was the virtue that he especially loved to see in his brethren, and he used to say “If the servant of God strives to obtain and preserve both outwardly and inwardly the joyful spirit which springs from purity of heart and is acquired through devout prayer, the devils have no power to hurt him”.  So joy is in fact the ‘blessedness’ of the Beatitudes;  and in the case of those who mourn, it is “the joy of a pure grief which has gone deeper than futile, whining regret and come to rest in the infinitely blessed love of God himself”.

Despite all that, joy remains unpredictable – like the one who gives it.  C.S. Lewis was himself ‘surprised’ by joy – and Pascal concludes his own account of discovering the living God with the words “Joy, joy, tears of joy”.  That is also how it was with William Haslam, an Anglican Vicar in 19^th century Cornwall, who, when preaching one day, “suddenly felt a wonderful light and joy coming into my soul”, whereupon a local preacher in the congregation stood up and shouted in Cornish manner “The parson is converted! The parson is converted!  Hallelujah!”

No wonder joy is often described as ‘the music of heavent’.  I was reminded of that recently at a concert in Kirkby Lonsdale.  As the choir sang Haydn’s Missa Brevis I remembered his famous words: “When I think upon my God, my heart is so full of joy that the notes dance and leap from my pen”.  We may not be composers.  But we can all be instruments in God’s concert.

James Newcome