Lenten Journey: Identifying Joy

Today, I want to take a journey toward “Joy.” Not simply “What makes me happy?” but “What fills my heart with joy?”

I want to get at a deeper experience of joy. I’m sure I could come up with more categories but for the sake of simplicity, I came up with three categories related to joy.

1. Distractions

2. Fun

3. Joy

When I first ask my self the question, “What brings you joy?” I am tempted to start listing things that I enjoy but some of those are simply distractions from… life. From the disturbing news of the world, worries about my health or the health of loved ones, worries about finances. I enjoy watching movies, playing Sudoku, and listening to pop music. But those are mostly distractions.

The next level of answers for that question brings me a list of things that are fun. I have fun when I ride roller coasters, go to the swimming pool and go down the big slide, and try a new recipe for dinner. These are all FUN things to do but I’m trying to go to a deeper soul level with this journey.

What fills my heart with joy?

When I was a young kid, I took piano lessons. Sadly, I stopped taking lessons before I could really give it more attention as an art. But I remember the feeling I would have after practicing a piece of music so that it stopped being notes played in the correct order and became music. That sound filled my heart with joy. I haven’t sung regularly in a while but I still identify that feeling as a moment of joy. That moment when the chorus comes together and we stop simply singing notes in the correct order and rhythm and instead create harmonies and sounds filled with feeling so that there is MUSIC in those notes as well as between the notes. THAT fills my heart with joy. I’ve been fortunate to have experienced a lot of moments of joy in my life related to music: Singing sea chanties with the Singer’s Club of Cleveland, Mahler’s 8th Symphony and Beethoven’s 9th with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, and everything from the exuberant to the sublime with the Denver Gay Men’s Chorus immediately come to mind. But there was one moment that was especially unique.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I was singing with the All-Ohio State Fair Youth Choir on a tour of Europe. Our tour began in England and Wales and, at the end of one of our concerts in Wales, the audience applauded as expected. Then, the audience began to sing to us. I understand from our director, who was from Wales, that they were singing a song about welcoming us to the hillside and how they will still be singing when we come back. The audience sang the song with full harmonies and the experience was stunningly beautiful. I’ve never heard an audience sing in appreciation before or since.

So, making music is definitely one the things that fills my heart with joy. Another is a whole raft of things with my children and my wife. Making my children laugh or smile is certainly one of them, especially when it is a little more hard-earned. Taking them out for ice cream is an easy trick but getting them to smile because we just did something together that they enjoyed is much more rewarding. And if we get my wife involved, all the more so.

I recall a time when the kids and I were home and Christine was either at work or had been doing something with a friend and was coming home a little later in the day. The kids and I spent part of that time choreographing a dance to a fun piece of music from the Disney movie “Coco.” (The music was an instrumental piece called “Jálale” if you want to hear it and imagine two kids and a dad dancing to it.) When Christine came through the door, we cued up the music and started our choreographed dance around her. THAT was heart-filled joy for me.  

As this blog gets longer than I anticipated, I must admit that writing fills my heart. Sometimes, it is a philosophical essay like this one. Othertimes, it is a political treatise. And still others, it is poetry. I enjoy the creativity and effort of writing and, when something comes together, that fills my heart with joy similar to the experience I have with music.

I could go on (and I probably will in my own journal) but I think you get my point. However, I will make one final point. The question is “What fills YOUR heart with joy?” I’ve given you my examples to convey the character of that heart-filled joy. But for some, what fills your heart with joy is what I consider fun or distraction. So, don’t judge your choices in comparison to what I have shared but simply on the question of “What fills YOUR heart?”


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You are welcome to take this journey in solitude in your own personal journal or share your reflections. If anything that you do makes you think you might want to continue a journey using Spiritual Direction, now or in the future, you can make an appointment with me through my website: 

www.RedRocksSDC.com 

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