Rev. William Aulenbach was a round-headed elf who wore a pinkish clerical shirt and wire rimmed glasses. At least 80 years old, he would shuffle into the dining hall at Webb School shortly after noon every Wednesday. Without waiting for a greeting from the headmaster or asking permission, he would turn on the microphone and shout “it’s great to be alive.”
We, students and teachers alike, knew what our response was expected to be. “Joy, joy, joy” we would dutifully reply.
In our first year at Webb, I wondered why and how this tradition had started. It seemed a little hokey. Over time, I came to view it as giving an old man a moment in the spotlight he once enjoyed as a parish rector, late-life recognition for him once a week in a life now out of the main stream of daily service to others.
These days, I see Rev. Aulenbach differently. He wished that all of us would see the joy that can come in living. He was still being a pastor.
Joy has been on my mind, prompted by a phone conversation with my sister, Sandee. I told her that a book our father had given to me bore the title Surprised by Joy. C.C. Lewis wrote it, and since he had married a woman named Joy late in his life, I assumed, wrongly, that the book was about discovering love.
It is helpful to read books before deciding what they are about.
Sandee and I pondered how joy was different from happiness. Modern usage often uses the two words interchangeably. When we rang off, I googled “joy” to find its etymology, and I clicked on a few of the articles that sounded, from their titles, like comparisons and contrasting of joy and happiness.
The upshot, of course, is that nobody really knows. Philosophers and poets have taken their shots at differentiating but they all base their points of view on certain assumptions. That leaves the field open for others, like me, to try my own reflections.
If you grew up in a Protestant Church and/or celebrated Christmas, you sang about “tidings of comfort and joy” and “joy to the world.” If you are a Person of a Certain Age, you might have giggled at a different “joy to the world” that also wishes “joy to the fishes in the deep blue see, joy to you and me.” If you enjoy classical orchestral music, you know that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was called “Ode to Joy,” named for the Frederic Schiller poem of the same name that provides the text for the singers in the fourth movement.
I think these references to joy are related. I also think each reveals how joy is different than happiness.
Joy bears a relationship to religion that happiness does not. In the Christmas story, people in need of God are being told that the awaited one has arrived. A messiah is not a transitory image; it is about something lasting—salvation in Christian understanding—and salvation would bring joy.
It was in that sense of the word that C.S. Lewis wrote about being surprised. He was raised as an average Anglican schoolboy who, as he matured, fell away from his belief to become a self-proclaimed atheist. Then, using the path of reason, he finds his way back to belief, finds joy and writes about it.
Schiller’s poem begins by connecting joy with the divine without being too specific. I don’t know that much about other major religions of the world. But I surmise that whatever believers find in their faith transcends momentary happiness, connecting people in some lasting way to something higher than themselves. At its purest, might not evangelism, for whatever faith tradition, be a sincere desire to invite others to share the joy one has found in faith?
Yet joy is not bounded by faith. I described to Sandee how I watched two red-vented bulbul birds busying themselves atop a tree outside our bedroom window. Apparently a pair, the two flitted back and forth with twigs and string to build a nest, pausing to snap a bug or two out of the air for sustenance.
Watching them, I felt joy.
Recently, Judy and I watched the sun set into a horizon unencumbered by clouds, perfect conditions for the green flash of light we saw as it disappeared. I suppose we were happy to be in the right place at the right time in the right conditions. What I felt, though, was joy.
Lives are constructed in very small bits. History and the history unfolding in the news we ingest every day focuses on the big bits. In doing so, we are distracted from seeing the joy available to us every day.
What nonsense lines: “Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea. Joy to you and me.” What profound lines, too.
One of Dad’s favorite verses in poetry was Wordsworth’s calling out “the little unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” How many unremembered moments of available joy do we miss because we are focused on big bits, like a messiah coming, and miss the little bits, the fish, the bulbuls, the green flash?
Joy incorporates gratitude and reverence and love and peace. It is a state of mind and not a transitory emotion.
And, as Rev. Aulenbach was teaching, you don’t seek it. It comes to you.