Joy is a response to the Lord’s presence. The people rejoiced because God responded to them, kindled their sacrifice. Has the fire of God come down and consumed your sacrifices? All your piety, your churchgoing, your repentance, your efforts to be good — do these produce shouts of joy? If not, something’s wrong; your sacrifice isn’t complete.
— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 17
Grievances don’t make you happy: Sometimes we hold on to grievances because we are afraid that our past was our best chance for happiness. However, you can’t continue to carry a grievance and hope to be happy. To be truly happy, you have to be willing to make love more important than your grievances, your ego, and your past. There comes a time, then when you have to accept that every grievance has an expiration date. By being willing to forgive, you come to see that there is life after a grievance.
— Robert Holden, Loveability, p. 182
In the parable of the treasure hidden in a field, Jesus’ purpose was not to explain the gospel in theological terms but rather to emphasize its dramatic effect on the believer. “In his joy,†we read, the man in the story gave up everything he had in exchange for his newfound treasure. He would never have done this for the sake of doubt or guilt, which are poor motivators. Though a man may feel ever so justified for his doubts, and though he may feel ever so virtuous about the load of guilt he carries – for doesn’t this show how well he understands his sinfulness? – still such feelings can never motivate him to live as God wants him to.
To follow and obey God, we need joy. We need to catch a glimpse of the greatest treasure of all – the “inexpressible and glorious joy†(I Peter 1:8) of believing in Christ.
— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 13-14
Throughout my experiment I noticed that whenever I felt worried or pressured about whether I was happy enough, joy eluded me. It is not the way of joy to be grasped. Rest is like unclenching a fist, letting go of the need to do or to know, in order that receiving might take the place of grasping. If we aren’t willing to rest, God will arrange rests for us, because He doesn’t want us to rush through life but to enjoy it.
One interesting property of happiness is that we cannot be happy without knowing it. We can be many other things — rich, blessed, lucky, loved — and not know it, but to be happy we must know it. The awareness is a part of the happiness. Rest is an opportunity to become aware of joy. We need sleep because we need dreams, and we need rest because we need daydreams.
— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 12
Staying isolated with our joys isn’t helpful either. It minimizes them, thus cheating us out of feeling their full thrill. We deserve joy in our lives — lots of it — because we will have our full measure of pain. Perhaps we fear others will criticize us for being braggarts if we sing forth our joy. But our real friends will sing right along with us. Our joys are deserved; they offset our trials. Telling others about both will let all our experiences count for something.
— Karen Casey, Peace a Day at a Time, June 28
Far from originating joy, humans are meant to be like an echo, reverberating with God’s joy and sending it back to Him. The very word rejoice contains (in the prefix “re”) this idea of “over again” or “back.” The message of joy bears repeating, for in this dark world we need to hear about joy again and again. Paul obviously thought so when he wrote from a prison cell, “I will say it again: Rejoice!” True joy is tireless. It’s like a little child squealing, “Do it again, Daddy!” to which our heavenly Daddy replies heartily, “Yes, let’s do it again! And again and again!”
— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 8
Another big obstacle to happiness arises when people start to become happier than those around them, including their families. It is very tempting to give up your happiness if you have a tribal belief that says It’s not okay to be happy when my family (husband, wife, mother, father, brother, sister) is not. Before you assume you don’t have this particular belief, ask yourself how comfortable you would be becoming a shining light of happiness in your family circle — would you downplay your happiness if you knew your tribe wouldn’t celebrate you?
Believe me when I tell you that each tribe has a very specific level of happiness it will allow its members. Some allow a very high level and support their members in achieving it. But more commonly, people run into difficulty when their happiness starts to show. After all, how come you have the right to be so happy when your sister has two autistic children, your cousin has a serious illness, your brother just got laid off, or your dad is in chronic pain from working the job that supported the family while you were growing up? And what gives you the right to be happy when your parents have stuck it out in an unhappy marriage for so many decades? Or how can you be happy when a friend you love is experiencing depression, a breakup or divorce, or is struggling to find his or her way in life?
Please look at all the ways in which you believe you have to give up, silence, or hide your happiness if people you love aren’t happy in their lives. If you believe it’s not quite okay to shine brightly unless the others you care about are shining just as brightly, you will find ways to sabotage your joy. One woman I worked with found great solace in her rewritten tribal belief: It’s reasonable to believe that everyone I love has the right to choose their level of happiness. Then she went a step further: Being happy by shining my brightest inspires others to do the same, if they choose.
— Christel Nani, Sacred Choices, p. 154-155
The Gospel is the real antidote to spiritual destitution: wherever we go, we are called as Christians to proclaim the liberating news that forgiveness for sins committed is possible, that God is greater than our sinfulness, that he freely loves us at all times and that we were made for communion and eternal life. The Lord asks us to be joyous heralds of this message of mercy and hope! It is thrilling to experience the joy of spreading this good news, sharing the treasure entrusted to us, consoling broken hearts and offering hope to our brothers and sisters experiencing darkness. It means following and imitating Jesus, who sought out the poor and sinners as a shepherd lovingly seeks his lost sheep.
— Pope Francis, The Spirit of Saint Francis, p. 131
It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good…. On every level of our life — in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience — we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one. And of course we don’t get that. You can’t, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good.
— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, chapter 5
One of our greatest life tasks is actually to learn to bear joy, and to let it influence our psychology in deeper and deeper ways. In actuality, there is a great cultural discomfort with joy, and our voracious pleasure seeking is often a mask for our fear of simple joy. Joy frightens us, it makes our defenses quake — it almost invites a superstitious fear of “the other shoe dropping.” We can bear joy for fleeting moments, but for most of us, self-appreciation all too quickly devolves into self-measurement.
In my work as a therapist I watch for these moments of inspiration and try not to let them pass. I encourage my clients to stay with their inspiring moment just a bit longer. When they do, something surprisingly deep will likely emerge….
You have similar gifts inside you, and the more you savor your small moments of inspiration, the better you will come to know them — and be changed by them.
— Ken Page, Deeper Dating, p. 45