Recommended (required?) watching/listening...
Rob Bell - Introduction to Joy
A few weeks ago, my cousin passed away after a long dance with cancer.
She was 36.
Survived by her mom, husband, and two daughters.
The pandemic and the current social/political upheaval have blown up so many areas of life (and our life together).
It all seems so… Meaningless.
Where can there be joy in this?
Joy…
It seems like an utter privilege to be joyful right now.
How can I be joyful when so many are suffering? When such good people die so young?
These are just a couple of the questions that were bouncing off of the walls of my mind when I came across this new talk/sermon by Rob Bell. But… In spite of my cynicism, I watched it.
And I learned that joy - unlike happiness - isn’t the opposite of ‘sadness’.
Joy embraces both happiness and sadness.
Both misery and elation.
Both suffering and celebration.
Joy doesn’t skirt suffering.
Joy has been through suffering
comes out the other side
embraces the fleeting and absurd nature of life
and says, life is short - so we should have another round.
It says to the cynic,
no… it’s WAY worse than that
we’re ALL gonna die
so let’s enjoy each heartbeat
that are so generously given to us.
At least, that’s what I learned from this talk/sermon.
Please… Afford yourself 79 minutes and en-joy.
Grace + Godspeed,
Jonas
P.S. It gets reeeeally good after the first 30 minutes or so:)
Jonas, I just got published a poem on 'happiness being of the personality and joy being of the soul'.
The fact of joy being an aspect of the soul indeed makes it all quite different from the human emotions of sadness, etc. The soul sees and feels life very differently from the personality.
Hiya. Sorry about your cousin. Blessings to her family.
I was wondering if you've heard of Ross Gay. He has a book of essays he wrote over a year called the Book of Delights. This is one of my favourites from the book: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/11/loitering-is-delightful/
Beware: there's swears.