Visitations of Joy

                                                               Craig Anderson

Luke 15:1-10                                                                                                         April 14, 2002

 

I subscribe to a journal for preachers which comes out quarterly, and deals at length with one theme.  Having run through my Lenten and Easter materials, I was searching through notes and files this week when I came upon an issue of the journal devoted to Joy.  With joy in short supply these days in a world torn by sorrow and war, the theme resonated, so I put up my feet and began to read.  Forty pages later, I came to the sober conclusion that all the talk about joy was simply that, talk, words piled on words.  But I also realized what I appreciated were the stories and illustrations which the authors used to spice up their articles.  So let me spare you the words:  the efforts to distinguish joy from pleasure and happiness; the admonishments that you are no darned good unless you are joyful; and skip straight to the stories.

 

John Updike was actually the first to put me on to this theme in a clipping I harvested from my reading some time ago.  Recalling his Lutheran childhood, Updike says that “the vitality of scripture corresponded in my consciousness as a child, to the vibrant, uncaused moments of sheer grateful happiness that I occasionally experienced.  I still have them, these visitations of joy, and still associate them with the Good News.”

 

To illustrate what he meant by Good News, Jesus also told stories: stories tinged with joy.  Which of you... having lost a sheep or a coin does not search carefully, until you have found it? And when you do, don’t you rejoice, and call the neighbors in to share your joy?  Imagine yourself  as one who God searches for, no matter how lost you may feel.  Imagine the sheer grateful happiness of being found. 

 

Occasionally we have these experiences, these visitations of joy, despite the trials and sorrows of life.  In Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote, “for as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy...”  Listen to these stories and rediscover your Tahiti.

 

Updike is joined in memories of childhood by the poet William Blake.  In “Songs of Innocence,” he wrote:

 

The Sun does arise,

and make happy the skies. 

The merry bells ring,

To welcome the Spring.

...Such, such were the joys,

When we all girls and boys,

In our youth time were seen,

On the Echoing Green...

 

The innocence of June Bingham’s childhood was broken by the cruelty of her parents.  But she writes, “To my surprise, in the latter half of life, a new form of joy has arisen.  Up to mid-life my night-time dreams of childhood had been in black and white.  One day -- or night -- by the grace of God and the mysterious workings of the human unconscious, it dawned on me that the intense suffering that my parents had inflicted on me had never been intentional.  Instead, they too, in that useful modern phrase, had been ‘victims of victims.’

 

As the French say, ‘to understand all is to forgive all.’  No sooner did I forgive my parents than my dreams of childhood burst into living color...

 

I can see as clearly as if it were today, a little blond girl in a smocked pale blue dress, her matching hair ribbon sliding down over her brow and her socks sliding down over her white sandals, as she runs joyously across the green grass toward the kitchen door.  Her aim is to help spoon the vanilla ice cream off the paddle in the hand-operated metal churn that every Sunday is placed in a tub of combined ice and rock salt.  Together with the return of color came a raft of happy memories to join the miserable ones.”

 

Every year around this time, I resolve to dig our ice-cream maker out of a pile in the basement.  Our garden will produce its first raspberries this year.  To honor joyous memories I promise to put one together with the other in July.  Bring a spoon!

 

Attached to the Updike clipping, I also found Bill Holm, a Minnesota poet, who shares a story told by the legendary food critic, M. F. K. Fisher, about an old man in the Victor Hugo Restaurant in Paris:

 

“He was dressed carefully in rather old-fashioned dinner clothes, with his feet in tiny twinkling pumps, like a doll's.  He ate little, and drank a half-bottle of wine with his meat.

 

For dessert he went through a never-varying formula with the intensity and detachment of a high priest.  An avocado was brought to him, cradled in a napkin.

 

He felt of it delicately, smelled it, usually nodded yes. It was cut in two with a silver knife. Then he himself detached the stone-skin from each half -- placed one part of the fruit gently on a large plate before him, and sent the other back to the kitchen.

 

Powdered sugar was brought, and the old man pressed it into the hollow of the fruit. He spent some time over this, making it firm and even.

 

Next the sommelier appeared with a pear-shaped bottle of clear Russian kummel. He poured a generous liqueur-glass of it, waited for the old man's sniff of approval, and went away.  Drop by drop the kummel disappeared into the moon of white sugar.  Very slowly, very patiently, very delicately it was stirred and pressed down and stirred again.

 

Finally the old man ate a small spoonful of the smooth green fruit-flesh, then another. Sometimes he stopped, sometimes he finished it. Then he drank a mouthful of cof­fee and left.”

 

Bill Holm says, “when I finished reading this story, I was, like Fisher her­self -- half tempted to go and buy an avocado and a bottle of kummel, but I resisted. The dish itself is not quite the point. Fisher says that 'very clear in my memory is the expression on the old man's face. He was happy...’”   “The question (writes Holm), the point is, when is your own face happy like this?”

                                                                  (Bill Holm, The Art of Brown Bread and Vinarterta)

 

Barbara Brown Taylor tells a story about another face: 

 

“I remember walking past a big downtown water fountain with a grown-up friend of mine a number of years ago. We were right in the middle of the Plaza at Georgia State University, with students sitting all over the place. It was one of the first days of spring. The sun was shining. Pigeons were flapping in the sky overhead. We were talking about something very adult when all of a sudden my friend just snapped. He ran over to the water fountain, plunged his hands into it and drenched himself. Then he ran back to me, squealing like a five-year-old, and put his cold, wet hands on either side of my face.

 

I was appalled, absolutely appalled. Everyone was staring. And I'll tell you the worst part. The worst part was that I wanted to throw a scarf over his head, be­cause his face was so completely open, so utterly defenseless, that I could hardly stand to look at it.

 

I didn't say it, but I thought it: ‘For heaven's sake, man, get hold of yourself! You've got to learn to pro­tect yourself better than that. Think what could happen to you if you walked around letting everyone see who you are like that. You could get hurt! You could scare someone!’  Now, all these years later, I wish I could find him and tell him that he was right and I was wrong, because these days there seems to be a real shortage of joy.”

 

Ronald Robbins, a therapist remembers once at a dinner party, that a woman he knew asked in all honesty, “how can you do such work?  Problems, problems, problems!  If I had to listen to them all day, I wouldn’t be able to stand it.  How can you do such work?”

 

“The question was a strong one, right to the essence.  I didn’t have a ready answer...” (Robbins says), “but in the silence, thank God, an answer did come.”

 

"Surely," I said, "therapy begins with problems and the hope is for their resolution. But it is how it's done that sustains me and enriches me.

 

'The way is love, working together; sharing moments, allowing truth to become visible. Problems unsolved, and suffered alone, can certainly be unbearable.  Problems shared, warm the heart and bring connection.  There is joy in my work. It is in the joy of meeting, the joy of love."

 

As he was dying, Bradford Smith wrote a book, Dear Gift of Life, in which he says, “We usually refuse to face death for ourselves until something forces us to.  Then, strangely, the response is not fear any longer, but acceptance, even contentment... You can relax, take time to drink in all that is beautiful, listen to all the music your soul longs for... read the books you have longed to go back to, let nature sink in through every pore, spend more time with those you love, and ease the string to your bow, so that living loses its tenseness but not its joy.”

 

Barbara Brown Taylor again, remembers that when she was last in Memphis, a friend told her about a big, black Pentecostal church she had visited on Sunday where the preacher - a lay minister who worked with inner-city kids - got so full of the Holy Spirit while she was preaching that she still had some left over when she got done, so she just stepped out of the pulpit and twirled around a couple of times on the red carpet, pumping her arms and shouting, “Yes, Lord!  Woo-o-o-o!  Woo-o-o-o!  Amen!”

 

Don’t worry!  It’s not going to happen here!  Raspberry ice-cream is about as much joy as I will permit myself to share, and yet for me this has been a season of joy in Brookside.  In an e-mail in December, when things were especially tense during our discussion about becoming more open and affirming, someone expressed the hope that if the vote were positive at the meeting in January, that there wouldn’t be a celebration which might exacerbate our feelings of division.  That was an appropriate request.  Majorities don’t want to trumpet at the expense of minorities.

 

  Nevertheless this is a season of joy as we welcome greater diversity.  It’s like Bill Holm says, “Clubs always do better when they get larger -- more inclusive, less full of judgment, dogma, cant.  Religions and political movements might learn something here.  If you want an art to be practiced intelligently, drain the opinions out of your crankcase, cultivate humor, and invite everyone.  The only two requirements are a sense of joy and irony.  Nothing else needed, though a little genius is nice.”

 

A sense of joy.  When did your face last look like a Frenchman savoring an avocado?  We were at the end of our first little run, cross-country skiing in January.  We had only been out 15 or 20 minutes:  a quick climb up on the ridge, a look down across a valley toward snow-covered mountains on the other side.  Then we entered the woods and wound up hill and got the first test of our lack of conditioning; the first taste of hard breathing, the first glint of sweat. Then the trail narrowed and there was a long, gentle, down hill.  By the time I glided to the bottom, I was in bliss.  I pumped my arms and shouted,  “Yes, Lord!” or something like that.

 

Find a water fountain.  Dig out an avocado and your ice-cream maker.  Release the tension on your bow and savor a favorite book or piece of music.  Go to the Tahiti in your  soul.  Strap on your skis and ride your bike to Patriot’s Path.  Understand, forgive:  let childhood memories be healed.  Experience the joy of being found, no matter how lost you may feel.  Such visitations of joy are associated with Good News.  We experience them occasionally and they sustain us. Woo-o-o-o! Woo-o-o-o! Amen!

 

 

                                                                                            Stories and illustrations mostly from

                                                                                   “The Living Pulpit,” Joy, ed. Ginger Grab

                                                                                                Volume 5, No. 4, Oct.-Dec. 1996