What is Joy?

I don’t know how to say how I feel right now.

Things continue to be a little better than they were. The garden’s growing nicely. Adrienne is excited for school. I’m having better energy after my getting sick the other week. Emotionally I’m a bit of a wreck. I keep having panic attacks and I can’t sleep. I know the things I’ve gone through aren’t things you get over after a week or two of respite. I know I’m going to be like this for a very long time. I tried to go to Mass again on Sunday. I got through the Liturgy of the Word sitting in a pew, stimming with my hands when the panic welled up. And then it was too much and I left, but I sat on the doorstep of the church by my favorite stained glass window until it was over. I think I’ll sit outside by the window the whole Mass next weekend.

I’ve been praying and meditating in the garden, as I do. The garden is where I feel closest to God. I also pray as I go swimming in the lake, and that helps me.

I have been praying and thinking about joy, lately.

The fruit of the Spirit is  love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Last year I decided that a god Who isn’t a God of love isn’t a God worth my time. Only love is worth my worship and devotion. I have been thinking about love and what a God of Love would look like for more than twelve months. Recently, I started thinking about Joy. Joy is the second fruit of the Spirit. I have been trying to imagine what a God of Joy might be like.

What is joy? Not just any joy, but the fruit of the Spirit known as joy?

It can’t just be a feeling, can it?

If joy is merely a feeling, I’m lost. No god who is just or reasonable could fault me for not being able to conjure up feelings. Feelings are beyond my control. You can create a feeling with drugs or emotional contagion or your brain accidentally making too little serotonin. I once yelled at a priest for the error of conflating feelings with faults, and I’d do it again. A god who mandates feelings is a tyrant.

Love is both a feeling, and not a feeling. You can have a gooey sentimentality for someone or something and call it love. You can have a deep and fervent passion for someone and call it by the same name. But you can also feel no love and still choose love.  I feel that I love my daughter fiercely, ninety per cent of the time. But there are moments when I can’t feel that love:  when she was a newborn and the colic had gone on for hours, and when she was a impossibly energetic toddler whose antics got me thrown out of the Adoration chapel in humiliation. I still go on acting like I love her when all I can feel is frustration, because love is both a feeling and a choice.  And then the feeling comes back, because she is truly wonderful and worthy of my love. I just couldn’t see that for a moment because I’m finite and I don’t see everything that’s real at once.

I think I read somewhere, a long time ago when I was studying Aquinas or someone like that, that God Who is perfect doesn’t have a separation in His mind the way people do. God’s love is all one, all the time. We who are imperfect sometimes feel love and sometimes have to choose love without feeling it. Heaven doesn’t have that problem, Heaven just loves. We have to grit our teeth to make the right choice, sometimes. Heaven really does delight in everything that’s lovable. Heaven doesn’t have to fake it. Humans do. Human love is sometimes a feeling and sometimes a choice, but the Love of God is always all of love.

Is joy like that?

Is joy a perfect thing that God does and is wholly, and that we perform piecemeal, like love? Does God joy in everything, while I sometimes feel joy and sometimes choose joy when it’s not there?

If so, how am I supposed to choose joy?

Do I have to caper around in an affected display of  mirth all the time no matter how much I hurt inside, like those horrible fakes in the Charismatic Renewal? No, that can’t be right. I am absolutely convinced that the Charismatic Renewal I experienced here in Steubenville, and their wannabes back home in Columbus, are the opposite of the Holy Spirit. As they were with love, so they are with joy.  Everything about them is fake. Theirs is a false joy.

What is the real joy? What does that look like?

I’ve racked my brain, and all I can come up with is Mr. Rogers.

My veteran readers know that I loved Mr. Rogers Neighborhood as a little girl, and when I was a young mother my Adrienne loved it even more. She watched videos of the old program over and over again until I memorized the dialogue. I’ve been impressed by the profoundness of his messages in such a silly, whimsical setting. His sermons speak to me. I think he was filled with the Holy Spirit.

On each episode of that program, Mr. Rogers would either go out to meet someone or entertain a guest. He would go to a factory where people make vegetable soup, or a dance school where children were learning ballet, or to a gymnasium where the Special Olympics athletes were competing, and admire what they did, and ask thoughtful questions. Or, he would welcome in Mr. McFeely to narrate a video on how people make towels. Or he’d welcome a guest artist who showed him how to play a new game. Or he’d talk with a visiting child about his wheelchair or his breakdancing hobby. Whatever people came to him and whoever he met, he stopped what he was doing and paid attention. He admired the skills and passions they had to show him. He was genuinely interested, and asked questions to learn more. He took joy in them.

Maybe the fruit of the Spirit is not a feeling or the performance of a feeling. Maybe the fruit of the Spirit know as joy, means taking joy in things. Admiring everything that’s admirable. Appreciating things for the good that they have. Taking interest in people who are different than you are. It’s wonderful when you can feel joy in things and people, but you can stop what you’re doing and take joy even when you don’t feel it. Stop and look at beautiful things. Ask questions and appreciate the things people do.

I think of how I feel when I find the first tomatoes on a vine I’ve planted and pruned and cared for. I think of going for a hike and having my breath taken away by those first wildflowers. I think of stopping all the very important grown-up things I’m doing to listen to Adrienne tell me a dollhouse story or show me a drawing she’s made. I think of when I learned to like soccer, when I hadn’t liked watching any sport before, because I love Adrienne and Adrienne wanted to join a soccer team. Because I love her, I went out to the soccer field and cheered her on and tried to learn about the sport, and I found it was interesting to watch, and now I take joy in something I didn’t know was joyful before.

I think of how happy I was to take those children to the museum and watch them take joy in the dinosaurs– how contagious that joy was.

And there I go again, thinking about The Lost Girl and her family. I was trying to forget. I’m still so upset and horrified, and I’m ashamed of myself for not getting over it. Please be patient with me.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.

We’ll see where we go from here.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.