Sabbatical Book Club: Joyful, Anyway

Philippians 4:4-9

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

So this morning I’m going to share some of my reflections on and responses to ‘Joyful, Anyway: Finding Delight in Impossible Times’. I want to begin with a bit of a reintroduction to the author, Kate Bowler. You may recognise the name because I have drawn on her writings before, but I think it is really helpful to know where she is coming from and what she is bringing to her thoughts on joy.

Kate is an academic by training and profession, specialising in the history of Christianity. At the age of thirty five, she was diagnosed with Stage Four bowel cancer, and that experience led her to a deeper understanding of life as beautiful and terrible and absurd. She also came to believe that it is not true to say that everything happens for a reason, but instead the best we can say is simply that everything happens, and we have to work out what we do with that. She has so far survived the cancer that should have killed her a decade ago, but that has not been without much suffering and sorrow. And so she writes from a place of deep acquaintance with pain and uncertainty. When she speaks about being joyful anyway, it is not because the joyful has come easily, but because she has needed it to survive the anyway. If you are interested in hearing more from Kate, she is also quite active online and hosts a podcast called Everything Happens.

I hadn’t realised when I first put this book down for today that it would be the day after World Mental Health Day, but it seems fortuitous timing, because “joyful anyway” has come to encapsulate my own experience of living with mental illness. I’ve spoken before about my history of depression and my struggles with anxiety, and around this time last year I received therapy for obsessive compulsive disorder. I now take medication, and I have routines and habits that support that in keeping me on an even keel. Some days are difficult and some days are hard work, but there is still much that is wonderful and beautiful and meaningful in those days. So I come to this from a similar place to Kate, which is probably why her book resonated so much with me.

Let’s turn to that book now. Kate begins not with joy but with the ache, which she describes as the opposite of joy. She says it is the touching point of grief and guilt and longing, and it will be something different for each of us. A relationship that we couldn’t make work. An unfulfilled dream. A loss that has cut us to the bone. We do many things to try and solve the ache or distance ourselves from it, but Kate suggests that sometimes we must turn towards the ache and accept it. Some things simply cannot be solved, and some things we cannot distance ourselves from without causing a different pain, and so she talks about mourning as the ritual we use to confront and embrace the ache.

Part of my ministry at the chaplaincy to the university has been leading four bereavement courses for staff. One thing that has become clear is how important it is for people to have rituals, safe and tangible ways to remember their loved one and process their grief. Wearing their favourite piece of jewellery, baking a cake on their birthday and blowing out the candles on their behalf, visiting their grave to tell them about important life events. Perhaps you have only thought about mourning in relation to death, but there are other types of loss, other types of ache, and perhaps we need rituals to help us through those too. Writing down regrets and burning them, anointing the site of an injury or operation and giving thanks that the scar is proof you survived it, telling awful jokes about the awful thing that happened until the laughter hurts more.

Maybe the ache feels like an odd place to begin a book about joy, but joy is not about being sheltered from or blinkered against sorrow, instead it is about not giving ourselves up to despair, which the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard called “the sickness unto death” because it disconnects us from ourselves and from God's intentions for us. Joy does not ignore the ache. It has to be honest about it or it cannot be honest about itself. It cannot always dull the ache either. But it can make sure that the ache is not all there is.

One of my favourite poems is Separation by WS Merwin. Your absence has gone through me / Like thread through a needle. / Everything I do is stitched with its color. Joy and the ache are both like threads, stitching their colours into everything we do. Fortunately I do think we have some say in which thread sews most stitches. Because Kate describes joy as the touching place of hope and gratitude and delight, and each of these are choices we can make, or at least things we can prepare ourselves for. It may not always be an easy choice, and it may be one we sometimes make with gritted teeth or trembling hands, but we can choose to steer ourselves towards hope and gratitude and delight, and so we can sew extra stitches of joy into our days.

Perhaps you’re thinking this sounds more self help than sermon, and you may have a point. But then we might say the same about Paul’s advice to think on whatever is true and noble and lovely. Of course for Paul, those things that are true and noble and lovely come from God, just as for Kate, it is God who is the source of our hope and gratitude and delight. As James writes, “every good and perfect gift comes from God”. That’s not to say those gifts can only be found in very obviously spiritual places with God in neon letters above the doorway. In all honesty, I think it is more often the case that the current flows the other way, and it is through the things that bring us joy that we discover the God of peace that Paul promises will be with us.

When I talk about joy I am always talking about God, and about the life God desires for each one of us, although the connection between faith and joy feels particularly poignant for me when it comes to the aspect which is hope. I think that is because I cannot imagine a hope that is not explicitly rooted in the life of Christ and the promise of resurrection, but that is something we will come back to in a future week.

There is a great line in the book where Kate says "I want to lower the threshold for joy". I think we can have this sense that joy is meant to be big and dramatic, trumpets and fireworks, but it really doesn’t have to be. Our days are littered with tiny joys, if only we can recognise them as such. That’s a large part of what I mean when I say that delight was the word of my sabbatical. I started to take a giddy pleasure in the smallest of things. At one point I practically skipped downhill because I was so excited to see how my first cyanotype came out, and another day I giggled out loud when I took a step into long grass and a dozen butterflies sprang up in front of me.

There is so much joy just lying around waiting to be found, although sometimes the ground will be bare, and then we must make joy or ask joy to come to us. I know someone who suffers from chronic fatigue which at times is so debilitating that she can hardly leave the house, but she can ask friends to send her pictures of their pets or drive her to somewhere she can see bluebells from the car. I do not want to dismiss how hard it can be to take hold of joy in some seasons of our lives, because I know it for myself, but I do want to encourage us to keep grasping for it, because it is within our reach.

I think there is another way to approach this, because if joy is inextricably entwined with God, and if John is right in his insistence that God is love, then it must surely follow that joy has much to do with love. Philosopher Emmanuel Kant acknowledged that when he set out his threefold understanding of how to be joyful - find something to do, find someone to love, find something to hope for. We need purpose and we need connection and we need assurance, and as Paul would tell us, the greatest of these is love, because love will always give us something to do and something to hope for. I suggested earlier that we can choose joy, but perhaps on days that we find that word difficult, we might choose love and find we have stumbled into joy anyway.

Towards the end of her book, Kate offers the following equation: living = the ache + joy. Revelation promises us that one day the ache will be gone and all will be joy, but until then we must learn to live with all the contradictions of this beautiful and terrible and absurd life, so let us fill it with as much hope and gratitude and delight as we can.

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Living with the joy and the ache is no small thing, so before I draw to a close with a poem by the wonderful Mary Oliver, I want to leave some space for reflection around the three parts of that equation. What makes you ache? What tiny joys have you experienced recently? What makes you feel you are really living?

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If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty

of lives and whole towns destroyed or about

to be. We are not wise, and not very often

kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this

is its way of fighting back, that sometimes

something happens better than all the riches

or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant

when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the

case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid

of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

- Don’t Hesitate, Mary Oliver