It seems to me that at least in part the ability to create and live creatively flows out of joy. Happiness certainly helps but happiness tends to be somewhat transitory (as an emotion) while joy (which encompasses happiness, enjoyment, and fullness) is a much larger and frequently more permanent attitude. I believe it is actually possible to be unhappy because of particular situations or circumstances and joyful at the same time (a topic for another post?) and because of that I think it is important to create within our lives and to teach our children to both be joyful and
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by John Godsey
by Carolyn Haywood
by Carolyn Haywood
Gratitude is a necessary component of joy, I believe. When we recognize the elements of “gift” in various aspects of life, joy flows.
I’m not sure about that. Gratitude is so often mixed up with “being grateful” (as in “You should be grateful for …”) that at least as we currently understand it I would say that gratitude is a good addition to joy but not a necessary component. Rather I think that as we start to experience joy, we will gain the ability to have an attitude of thanksgiving (a form of praise and not (as gratitude is so often) a paying of duty to a benefactor.)
Frequently I think that Christians are not joyful not because of some deficiency in understanding the good God has done for them, or because of an ungrateful heart etc. but because they/we have got the wrong end of the stick altogether. Joy and Thankfulness are not supposed to be conscious responses to God’s Gifts, they are states of being that we are restored to when we are restored to full fellowship with God. They are also part of what we were made to be (not attitudes we were made to have) but part of our being and as such they are not in any way limited to the experience of the Christian. In fact I know many more joyful and thankful people (note the “ful” at the ends of those words) who would not claim to be Christians than I know Christians whose participation in those states is obvious without their saying a word.
I’m not sure what’s in my mind/heart is coming across clearly here….I’m just beginning to consider some of these things…K
Don’t you find, though, that those who have joy, whether Christian or not, have a sense of wonder and thankfulness about life? It’s not so much an “attitude of gratitude” but a real aspect of their hearts…..almost a childlikeness that hasn’t been thwarted.
Yes, that is true of those who strive to live fully in the world in general. Because they are not trying to be somewhere else they are able to appreciate what they see around them in a similar way to a young child who is just beginning to savor the world. The interplay of these experiences, emotions and attitudes (if emotion and attitude are even the right words) is very difficult to describe in language. We speak of them linearally (I’m not certain that is a word, illustrating the difficulty) when in reality the phenomenon (lifestyle) is really simultaneous. Can we untangle which comes first? I’m not sure.
What we do know is that all is grace, all is the healing of the world and the returning of us to what we were meant to be…Eucharistic living is our high calling and our great privilege…K