". . . they made you from day to day” “ for joy.” (Carl Sandburg) Here’s the thing. I want to live from the sources of joy. I want to bring happiness to others.

Will you free associate with me? When I say happy “ what comes to mind? For me it is the smell of the air in the morning before it rains. Happy “ meeting my son for dinner in Harriman. Happy “ at the thought of a vacation. When I say joyful “ what comes to mind? I think of the day of my ordination “ May 31, 1992. A culmination of years of preparation and dreaming. A congregation I loved saying We ordain you to the Unitarian Universalist ministry. Lots of people who cared about me and wished me well, warmly. The music; the fun; the chocolate reception. Think of your own times of happiness and joy. Picture the scenes, the people present, the smells, the sounds, the sights. Hold onto those bits of happiness and joy; hold onto those feelings and experiences.

Henry David Thoreau wrote “Surely joy is the condition of life.” Thomas Jefferson wrote that we have an inalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness.” Wow. Can that be so? We’ll get back to that. First, what is happiness? What is joy? What’s the difference between them? And even more important, how does one recognize and approach them? How did that joy and happiness come about in the free associations we just practiced? Is joy a feeling? Is happiness a state of mind? A mystical experience? The dictionary says that joy is from the Old French and means gladness, exhilaration, delight, or intense happiness. There’s a town called Joy, Illinois and a functional programming language named Joy, unusual because it is based not upon lambda calculus but upon composition of functions, (whatever that might mean). But these definitions barely describe the experience of joy. So let’s turn to poetry. As William Wordsworth says, we are surprised by joy.” Samuel Longfellow, a 19th century Unitarian, wrote “Into all our lives, in many simple, familiar, homely ways, God infuses this element of joy from the surprises of life, which unexpectedly brighten our days, and fill our eyes with light.” More intensely Carl Sandburg, a Unitarian, wrote

Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by.
As the Apache dancer
Clutches his woman.
I have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sent on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.
Joy always,
Joy everywhere “
Let joy kill you!

Keep away from the little deaths. That’s the joy of my ordination “ that intense surrounding. Joy seems bigger than happiness somehow. Joy a deeper state out of which happiness arises? Joy the roots and tree trunk, happiness the branches and leaves? When I free-associated, happiness came in shorter bursts and joy more long lasting. Joy as intense happiness. Both joy and happiness here are emotional states. Joy is also a spiritual state. “Surely joy is the condition of life.” (Thoreau) Many people believe that love lies at the core of life; a loving energy fills the universe, not completely, obviously, but enough so that it is always present. What I just called love others might call the connections between living beings, the inter-dependence. Others might call it god, or nature. Whatever we call it, joy arises because of it. Because there is love, there is joy. Because there is connection, there is joy. Think about it. The times we recall as joyful are connected to something; they arise out of an interaction with something or someone.

Joy is a spiritual condition of life, and surely the manifestations of joy are everywhere, yet we are often surprised by them. Do we not see it around us? The practice is to cultivate a mind that can recognize and receive and delight intensely in joy. How to do that? Now I think of my dog. Every time I walk into the house, every time, she wags her tail and runs around and jumps up and down, so happy is she to see me. Every time. This dog has a joyful state of mind and receives the world with joy. She’s something of an inspiration to me. She lives in the present moment and when we are awake in the present, all sorts of things can surprise us with joy. Have you ever been surprised by the sound of rain on the roof and stopped a moment to listen and found yourself holding your breath, attentive to the least sound? Have you ever been surprised by the beauty of a strawberry and stopped a moment to taste the most wonderful fruit you have ever had? Have you ever been surprised by the sight of a baby and stopped a moment to watch and felt a smile come over your face? Have you ever been surprised by the kindness of another person and stopped a moment to take it in, eyes welling with tears? Can you recall how those times of surprise contained their own intense joy? The way to find these potential surprises is to be alert for them. To be present wherever you are, trusting they are all around. And to stop, just a moment, for noticing. This is what it means to live from the sources of joy. Pay attention. The spiritual practice of living in the present moment opens us to the surprises of joy all around us. It allows us to experience joy. “I still respond to the call of the cosmos, although the way I do so has changed. The call is as clear and compelling as it was those many years ago. When I hear it now, I pause, and, with all my body, with every atom of my being, every vein, gland, and nerve, I listen with awe and passion.” (Thich Nhat Hanh.)

The opposite of joy is fear. Fear makes it hard to stay in the present because fear takes us into the future, into future losses. The practice of cultivating a mind of joy requires fearlessness. Fearlessness to remain in the present moment whatever it might be. “No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. We are very rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear. . . . Once there was a young warrior whose teacher told her she had to do battle with fear. It seemed too aggressive, too scary. . . But the teacher . . . gave her instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student stood on one side and fear on the other. The warrior was feeling very small and fear was looking very big. . . They both had their weapons. The young warrior . . . prostrated (herself) three times (before fear) and asked (if she could have permission to do battle with it. Fear thanked her for showing respect.) The young warrior said, “How can I defeat you? “ Fear replied, “My weapons are that I talk fast, and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don’t do what I tell you, I have no power over you. You can listen to me, and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don’t do what I say, I have no power.”

The idea of happiness, like joy, contains an emotional component, but unlike joy, it also contains an ethical component. We’ll see this as we look into the history of the idea of happiness. Wikipedia defines happiness as “an emotional state characterized by feelings of satisfaction and enjoyment.” In other words, happiness is a less intense version of joy. Scientists point out that happiness in this sense relates to brain chemistry. Historically, however, happiness has been more than an emotion. Philosophers like Aristotle and religious thinkers like Buddha assert that happiness is also an activity involving our fulfillment as human beings. The historian David McCullough, in talking about Jefferson’s language in the Declaration of Independence, points out that “In general, happiness was understood to mean being at peace with the world in the biblical sense, under one's own "vine and fig tree." But what did they, the Founders, mean by the expression, "pursuit of happiness"? It didn't mean long vacations or material possessions or ease. As much as anything it meant the life of the mind and spirit. It meant education and the love of learning, the freedom to think for oneself. Jefferson defined happiness as "tranquility and occupation." For Jefferson, as we know, occupation meant mainly his intellectual pursuits.” (David McCullough)

In seventeenth-century usage, public happiness and the common good were more or less synonymous. Far from being a matter of personal fulfillment, happiness most often referred to the communal prosperity of country or kingdom. . . . Practically speaking, the emerging eighteenth-century emphasis on happiness as an individual matter as well as a common concern meant that people began to focus as much on private sources of happiness as on public ones. Historians argue that the desire for happiness helped foster the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. . . . By the early nineteenth century, the idea that happiness should relate to the common good had become almost entirely eclipsed by the quest for private gain. In one mark of the ever-increasing role of consumerism in the definition of happiness, Independence Hall, the statehouse in which Jefferson had first written the Declaration, found new use in the 1830s as a clothing store. To attract customers, the owner of the store published an advertisement announcing, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ”that [here] they can obtain Clothing as rich, as cheap, and as durable as at any other establishment in the nation." Happiness, understood as a public concept in the seventeenth century, had been almost entirely privatized by the nineteenth. People in search of happiness . . . began to turn inward to family life as a source of personal satisfaction, focusing on nurturing deeper emotional ties with spouses and with smaller numbers of children.” (Nicole Eustace on _www.americanforeignrelations.com_ (http://www.americanforeignrelations.com) )

For us today, happiness is more commonly understood as a private emotion, yet it has not completely lost its connections with living a virtuous life. Religious thought might argue that “good” people are happy; that leading an ethical life brings happiness to oneself and others. Psychology might argue that quite often people behave in ways that society does not consider good as a result of some emotional and/or psycho-social or even chemical problems. Happiness still has ethical implications.

Happiness is not something we can attain. It is not a goal. It isn’t lost so it can’t be found. It cannot depend on the changing conditions of the world. It cannot come from acquisition of either material or spiritual things. It is not the absence of sorrow. Happiness is a practice. It’s a way of being awake in the world, the same as joy. Also, happiness is a practice of ethical living. It is a series of choices that we continually choose to make, or not make, on the levels of spirit, mind, emotion and body. If we practice happiness we bring peace and freedom into our lives and the lives of others.

The opposite of happiness is sorrow. Cultivating happiness means first, cultivating the reception of sorrow. Often we know happiness because we know sorrow. To adapt something written in The Prophet: “Your (happiness) is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more (happiness) you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? When you are (happy), look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you (happiness). When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. Some of you say, (Happiness) is greater than sorrow, and others say Nay, sorrow is the greater. But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed. Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your (happiness).”

Happiness and joy share the emotional qualities of well-being, delight, satisfaction and enjoyment, although joy is a more intense form of happiness, or happiness is a less intense form of joy. But while we can open ourselves to the joy that is a spiritual condition of life through the practice of paying attention to the present moment, we can offer happiness to ourselves by living ethically and for the common good. And of course the spiritual and the ethical are not fully distinct from one another. Ethics and spirituality share certain characteristics: integrity, honesty, courage, humility, openness, compassion to name a few.

But it’s the experience of happiness and joy that carries the power. Can we free associate again? Think of experiencing Joy “ its emotional and spiritual aspects if you can. An e-mail from my friend Anne titled Madrid, Sunday am, renewing the connection of our friendship, treasured and read many times before I sent a reply. Joy “connection, surprise, the condition of life if we will open ourselves to it, here and now. Think of experiencing Happiness “ its emotional and ethical aspects if you can. Performing the marriage ceremony for a young man who grew up in this congregation. Taking a lot of time to learn about the couple, the families and putting together a service that would unite while honestly respecting the differences. Realizing what a pleasure it was for me to be a part of it. Happiness “ enjoyment, integrity, a way of living and making choices that promotes the common good and that taps into one’s own generosity and desire for another’s happiness. As the bumper sticker says, Don’t postpone joy. Don’t postpone happiness either.

“May we be happy, peaceful and light.” (Jamie Rusek) May we know joy through connection with life. As the Chinese proverb says, If we keep a green bough in our hearts, the singing bird will come. May it be so.