SERMONS

A friend sent me a copy of a beautiful greeting from Fra Giovanni written in 1513. It goes like this.

I salute you. I am your friend and my love goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got; but there is much, very much, that while I cannot give it, you can take… No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not in this present little instant. Take Peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy.

Christians consider joy a quality that comes with their faith. One Christian writer lists several examples of this. In the eighteen century Jonathan Edwards considered the presence of joy a sign of true religious experience. ("It was, he held, the dead giveaway that God was present in someone's life.") In the canonization process to make someone a saint, some would say that any person lacking joy would not be qualified. "…Their cause would be poked full of holes." And, "There is no such thing as a sad saint." (from Weavings, 1993, Doris Donnelley)

This is not, though, a unique characteristic of Christianity-or of this season in the Christian year. In fact, I would go so far as to say joy is a characteristic of a life of faith-in the countless expressions that may take. I consider joy a universal attribute of full, rich, meaningful living. It is radically different than happiness. Than pleasure, or fun. It can be present in spite of circumstance. In fact some suggest that the presence of joy in the face of dire circumstance is the only way to judge true joy. I would say it is not an emotional quality but a spiritual quality. It is a spiritual quality, like many others, that is never fully realized, yet always promised.

Unitarian Universalist minister Carl Scovel, recently retired from Kings Chapel in Boston, spoke of joy this way in his Berry Street Lecture to the 1994 General Assembly in Ft. Worth. He calls the heart of his faith the "great surmise."

The Great Surmise says simply this: At the heart of all creation lies a good intent, a purposeful goodness, from which we come, by which we live our fullest, and to which we shall at last return. This is the supreme mystery of our lives. This goodness is ultimate-not fate, not freedom, not mystery, energy, order, nor finitude, but this good intent in creation is our source, our center, and our destiny. . . Our work on earth is to explore, enjoy, and share this goodness. "Neither duty nor suffering nor progress nor conflict-not even survival-is the aim of life, but joy. Deep, abiding, uncompromised joy.

Let me say a little more about what I mean by joy. I can't think of an experience of joy that isn't an experience of intimate connection. Recently I was with a group of people discussing what we considered spiritual experiences. That's a good way to distinguish the kind of joy I'm speaking of. I realize that each experience shared was an experience of joy. And whenever I speak of spiritual experience you can be sure that what I mean is intimate connection. Like the moment a parent first sees a child's eyes. Or a moment in the woods, when you grow roots like the tree you are leaning against and you realize that you are the same as the tree. Or a dark night when the stars reach across the whole sky and into your body. Or a moment when you look across the room and catch your lover's quick glance and know that you belong. Or when you sit together in a holy place and experience the mystery of music shared. Theologian Wendy Wright says, "Joy arrives when divinity dances in us." Divinity, intimate connection.

Last week Anna Belle Leiserson and I went together to a meeting where we were asked to share our understanding of Unitarian Universalist spirituality. We are on a denominational committee that is exploring ways our association can better serve lay people who are abused by ministers. The question of Unitarian Universalist spirituality was a challenging question for all of us on the committee. But Anna Belle's opening to her statement captures something important and difficult to capture. I share it with her permission:

I believe the divine is in us all. It isn't separate from person to person, but connects child to mother to father to family to friends and on and on, to sun, earth, water, air, and ultimately the unknowable. Why it seems elusive I don't know. Why I can sense it at all is a mystery too. Mostly it dances on the edge of experience, on the periphery of a headlong rush through daily life. To meet it squarely comes unexpectedly, with close attention, practice, and a melting of defenses.

Joy, beautiful radiance of the gods, daughter of Elysium, we set foot in your heavenly shrine dazzled by your brilliance. Your charms re-unite what common use has harshly divided: all men become brothers under your tender wing.

Secondly, Anna Belle says, it dances on the edge of experience. On the periphery. This has also been my experience. Something catches my eye beyond where I stand-I can almost see it to recognize it. I recognize something just beyond the horizon of my vision. It is peeking out at me.

So Anna Belle reminds us that the divine connects us. And that with close attention, practice, and a melting of defenses, we might experience Divinity in more than the "periphery of a headlong rush through daily life."

Carl Scovel also advocates close attention. In his address he "emphasized that beyond the vague, unfocused sense of 'something more' lies the focused spirituality of a path and of a spiritual discipline." One might compare such a move to the kind of shift that happens when we move in our lives "from casual conversation into a relationship." Close attention.

If this is truly our aim, if Joy is our life's work, then it certainly deserves our close attention. Our discipline. We need more than a vague sense of something more. We need commitment. We need more than a season of glad tidings. We need to be ready for Joy. And we need a community that reminds us that relationship is possible. That connection is imperative. That joy is around us and within us.

This is some of the potential Christmas holds, I think. Christmas is a reminder of the promise of joy. No one said we would find joy and keep it. There is no guarantee that we will not have to search over and over again for Joy in our lives. But in a life of faith, a life lived in fullness and meaning, a life that constantly rejects the harsh divisions that come our way, in this life of faith we can trust that Joy will come again.

The harsh divisions are usually what we expect, though. We are ready for them. The stark edges of our lives. We even tend to correct the blurring of distinctions, the softening of edges. As Lisel Mueller describes in this poem, "Monet Refuses the Operation."

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.