Joy and Human Flourishing

Essays on Theology, Culture, and the Good Life

Miroslav Volf, Justin E. Crisp, Miroslav Volf, Justin E. Crisp, Justin E. Crisp, Miroslav Volf, Justin E. Crisp

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781451482072
• eBook ISBN: 9781506402864
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Joy is crucial to human life and central to God's relationship to the world, yet it is remarkably absent from contemporary theology and, increasingly, from our own lives! This collection remedies this situation by considering the import of joy on human flourishing. These essays—written by experts in systematic and pastoral theology, Christian ethics, and biblical studies—demonstrate the promise of joy to throw open new theological possibilities and cast fresh light on all dimensions of human life. With contributions from Jurgen Moltmann, N. T. Wright, Marianne Meye Thompson, Mary Clark Moschella, Charles Mathewes, and Miroslav Volf, this volume puts joy at the heart of Christian faith and life, exploring joy's biblical, dogmatic, ecclesiological, and ethical dimensions in concert with close attention to the shifting tides of culture. Convinced of the need to offer to the world a compelling Christian vision of the good life, the authors treat the connections between joy and themes of creation, theodicy, politics, suffering, pastoral practice, eschatology, and more, driven by the conviction that vital relationship with the living God is integral to our fullest flourishing as human creatures.

5

Calling and Compassion: Elements of Joy in Lived Practices of Care

Mary Clark Moschella

The field of pastoral theology and care has been conceptualized as a form of religious response to human suffering. It is said that our research begins “at the point where human suffering evokes or calls for a religious response and sometimes at the point where a religious response is given and/or experienced.”^[1] In light of this widely shared understanding, it is not surprising that, with a few important exceptions,^[2] joy is as understudied in this field as it is in the other theological disciplines represented in this volume. Given the power and pull of experiences of suffering that call forth a religious response, ranging from grief and trauma to poverty and prejudice, it is not easy to assert that human experiences of joy merit the focus of this field of study. Joy seems to be a comparatively lightweight topic, unrelated to human suffering and the need for pastoral care. Yet, as I have found in my research, lived experiences of suffering and joy are not polar opposites, but often close companions. In this field that “pursue(s) a participatory, performative, and proactive kind of knowing that stays close to the ground, attends to human agony and ecstasy, and attempts to relieve suffering,”^[3] we have attended more to agony than ecstasy. “Making room for joy” in our research, teaching, and lived practices of care is necessary in order to more fully and deeply understand human life, and the range and power of religious responses that contribute to human flourishing.^[4]

In order to advance this claim, I will begin with an exploration of the meaning of joy, using experiential and pastoral theological frameworks. This will be followed by a brief synopsis of the recent history of the field of pastoral theology and care, and an explanation of how joy became to a large degree absent from the conversation. Then I will offer a brief overview of my current research and analysis of the workings of joy in the lives of religious leaders and other caregivers, and my efforts to identify in their stories the ideas, theologies, practices, and habits that support joy and human flourishing. Finally, I will reflect upon the story of one of these caregivers—the physician and human rights advocate, Paul Farmer—in some detail, focusing on references to vocation and compassion in his story, and advancing the case that calling and compassion are two elements of joy-full work that helps to increase human flourishing.

What Is Joy?

The noun joy has been defined as “the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying; keen pleasure; elation.”^[5] I think of joy as an embodied awareness of holy presence and extravagant love, an awareness that dawns upon us like grace. It carries a sense of the unexpected, of surprise. When C. S. Lewis wrote of his childhood in his memoir, Surprised by Joy, he noted that joy involves both memory and longing. “All joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’”^[6] The experience of joy is something intensely felt, perceived as an ancient memory bubbling up from deep inside even while it also feels given, from some great beyond, an experience so unexpected and profound that one can only try to take it in. At the same time, joy leaves a lasting impression, one that comes to surface just as grief does, in the most ordinary of days. The experience of joy is not fleeting or shallow, but deep and striking. It is linked to some object of goodness or wonder.

Joy versus Happiness

Any attempt to define joy inevitably brings up the idea of happiness and the question of how they differ or overlap. While some make vociferous distinctions between the two, I view joy and happiness as what William James might call “near relatives.” James suggested that we could learn a good deal about a phenomenon by comparing it to other phenomena that are similar.^[7] Happiness is similar to joy, though happiness suggests something milder, such as a good mood, good fortune, or a happy turn of events. The root hap, related to happenstance, suggests good luck. As Darrin McMahon puts it, “Happiness has deep roots in the soil of chance.”^[8] We are happy when things go our way, when we laugh and have fun, or when we have experience ourselves as fortunate.

In the United States we are familiar with the phrase the pursuit of happiness from the Declaration of Independence. This idea has long been associated with the private pursuit of material goods, such as in “the American dream.” Today, the pursuit of happiness that is linked to prosperity can be seen in the near explosion of popular literature known as “happiness studies,” and in the personal coaching for success industry that follows from it.^[9] We can appreciate the goodness of human happiness, good mood, and even the pursuit of health, strength, and reasonable material well-being. Indeed, these experiences can give rise to a sense of gratitude, which sometimes leads to joy.

However, joy and happiness are not one and the same. Joy indicates something deeper, more embodied, more acute—it is akin to aliveness, or animating force. According to C. S. Lewis, “It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”^[10] Joy also signifies a broader and more transcendent sense of goodness, one that links not just to personal well-being, but also to the larger reality, and to a vision of broader human flourishing. Joy is both corporeal and corporate in this reading. It is linked to what we feel in our bodies and in our communities, our bodies of faith. Joy often arises out of deep interpersonal connections and the experiences of loving and being loved. It may also arise in communities of resistance to evil or injustice. It is something that is deeper for being shared. Joy has an expansive quality, a sense that there is enough, more than enough, goodness and love to go around.

Joy in Caregiving

In my investigation of joy as it is experienced and expressed in life-giving ministries of care, I have arrived at a pastoral theological description, rather than a definition, of joy. This description is provisional and particular, with no claim to being comprehensive or universal. In the narratives I have studied, joy comes down to this: to being awake and deeply alive, aware of the love and goodness of God, and mindful of the wondrous gift of life. This is a holistic awareness, involving thoughts, emotions, breath, body, and community. In these stories, joy emanates from love of neighbor and a sense of calling to stand with “the least of these,” those who are socially, economically, or politically marginalized. This joy is not naïve, but seeing, and committed to caring.

Joy in pastoral ministries is magnified by the blessing of a sense of vocation that challenges one to step outside of one’s self into relationships of care and communion. Heidi Neumark uses the term ecstasy to describe her experience of ministry in the South Bronx. She writes,

Ecstasy comes from the Greek “ek stasis” and implies moving out of stasis, out of a set position. Of course, the word is used for spiritual transport, but it strikes me that the church ought to see its daily role as following a path of ecstasy, leaving behind all that is stagnant and staid and stepping out into the unknown, allowing ourselves to be displaced as we enter into relationship with others in their space. Ecstasy, then, is not just interior communion with God but communion with our neighbor.^[11]

It is the privilege of entering into deep communion with one’s neighbor that holds the potential for enlarged and ecstatic joy for those engaged in caregiving ministries of diverse sorts.

What Joy Is Not

Along with this rather basic description of what joy is, I have also determined some things that joy is not. First, joy is not an escape from sorrow or a turning away from suffering. Ann Voscamp writes, “Joy and pain, they are but two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all those that don’t numb themselves to really living.”^[12] Joy involves being awake and not numb, attuned to life in the present moment, with all of its sweetness as well as its sorrows. As caregivers well know, it is often while in the midst of working through a great sorrow that a glimmer of something like joy breaks through. Oddly, joy allows one to experience deep sorrow with less fear, because the precious and precarious dimensions of life present themselves as intertwined.

For the Romantics, who celebrated depth of feeling, the link between pain and joy was explicit. Coleridge, in his poem, “Dejection: An Ode” wrote, “Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud.”^[13] The intertwining of these deep feelings is evident to many of us. We can cry tears of pain and tears of joy. The Romantics understood joy as “subjective, intimate, and personal,” and yet, also as an experience of something larger, transcendent. Carlyle used the term blessedness to describe it.^[14] Indeed, deep joy seems often tinged with spiritual force. It feels like the gift of God, in that it arrives on its own, connecting us to something larger than ourselves, something beyond us that we cannot quite fathom.

Second, joy is not a frill, an extra that we can do without. We do not live by bread alone.^[15] Joy and some of its other “near relatives,” such as wonder, beauty, and hope, can hold us and heal us when words and the usual distractions fail.^[16] Whether encountered through nature, art, prayer, work, play, or human relationship, embodied experiences of joy in this sense of aliveness and awareness of the good are needed to feed and sustain us in sorrow, and to open in us pathways to the love of God and neighbor.

We also need joy in the sense of aliveness, awareness of both pleasure and pain in the body, for moral reasons, as Paula Cooey has pointed out.^[17] The bodily awareness of pleasure and pain affects our capacity to empathize with other bodies in pain or in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction: A Bright Sorrow
• Christianity: A Religion of Joy
• Reflections on Joy in the Bible
• Joy: Some New Testament Perspectives and Questions
• Toward a Theology of Joy
• Calling and Compassion: Elements of Joy in Lived Practices of Care
• The Crown of the Good Life: A Hypothesis
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index