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Extravagant Joy!
“Don’t be afraid,” said the angel to the shepherds when Jesus was born. “I’ve come to bring you good tidings of great joy.”

Great joy. Have you had any great joy lately? Any joy at all? Joy isn’t the same thing as pleasure, I’m sure you know. Most of us live as if the angel said, “I bring you good tidings of great pleasure that will be to all people.” We’re very big on pleasure. Our whole culture is oriented toward it. Big-screen TVs, iPods, double mochas, Jacuzzis in our motel rooms, sleek, gas-guzzling automobiles. We’re really very good at pleasure.

My old friend Ken Chafin used to tell a story about two soul-winners down in Texas, a veteran and a novice, who had been out all day calling on people and winning them to the Lord. Late in the day, they drove out to a neighborhood of big ranch houses on two-acre lots and pulled into a driveway behind a Porsche and a BMW. As they were approaching the door, they happened to walk past a picture window and they glanced inside. The man of the house was sitting there in his skivvies in a big leather relax-a-chair —“the kind,” as Ken said, “that conduces, and induces, and reduces, and seduces you”—and it was pointed toward a great television screen on the other side of the room where he was watching a football game. In one hand he held a can of beer, beaded with moisture, and with the other hand he was languidly stroking the head of a beautiful dog. From time to time, he appeared to sight along his big toe at something on the screen across the room.

As the veteran soul-winner was reaching for the doorbell, the novice suddenly caught his arm. “Just a minute,” he said. “Before we go in there I want you to tell me something. What kind of good news do we have for him?”

It was a point well taken. If the angel had said, “I bring you good news of a great pleasure that will be to all people,” they didn’t have a thing to contribute to that man’s well being. He had everything. He had it all.

But joy is another matter, isn’t it? Most of us have a reasonable amount of pleasure in our lives but not a surplus of joy. Joy is subtler and richer and deeper than pleasure. Pleasure is derived from the flesh, joy belongs to the soul. The Bible makes that distinction. It gives short shrift to the man who tore down his barns and built bigger ones to hold everything, and then said to himself, “Eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow you die.” It seems that our pleasures often conspire to crowd out a sense of true joy. They do, don’t they?

I know that for a fact. Several years ago, when I stopped being a professor to become the minister of a large church, it happened to me. I got so busy in my new work that I hardly had time to notice any joy. One day I realized I wasn’t enjoying my life the way I once did, and I went to a counselor about it. “I don’t feel any joy any more,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, after she listened to me. “I want you to do something.”

“What’s that?”

She said, “I want you to sit down every night and make a list of all the little joys you had during the day but didn’t bother to notice at the time.”

I tried that. I ran across some of those lists only recently. There were usually ten or twelve or maybe even fifteen things on a list—all very simple things. A bit of poetry that kept running through my head. The texture of old tree bark. The smile of an elderly church member. The sound of a friend’s voice on long distance. The luminous blossom of a morning glory. A chipmunk scampering ahead of me on the sidewalk.

I remember how amazed I was that I was having all these little joys and yet hadn’t been seeing them, hadn’t been noticing them. Just making the lists helped. Soon I began noticing the joys as they occurred, and before long I was feeling like my old self again.

And you know what I also noticed? I began giving thanks for the joys. I did. Inevitably, I felt some kind of connection between them and God. That’s because joys inevitably lead us to God. This is what the Bible wants us to see, that God is the center of all joy—which is why the coming of Christ meant “great joy.”

The angel promised this at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. And at the end of his Gospel, Luke told the story of those two disciples from Emmaus. Do you remember them? They were on their way home from Jerusalem after Jesus was crucified, and they were dragging along as if they’d lost their best friend. Suddenly Jesus appeared and walked with them. They didn’t recognize him. But he asked them, “Why are you so downhearted?” They said, “You mean you’ve been in Jerusalem and you have to ask? We thought Jesus was going to be the Savior of the world, and today the Romans killed him.”

Jesus began to remind them of all the scriptures that described how the Savior of the world must suffer and die. It was surely the greatest Bible lesson of all times. When the disciples reached their home, they begged Jesus to come in. And when he was giving the prayer of blessing over the bread before they ate it, they suddenly realized who he was, and he disappeared from their midst just like that.

They were so thrilled that they couldn’t contain the excitement. It was dark and the roads were undoubtedly dangerous, but that didn’t matter. They had to get back to Jerusalem and tell their friends they had seen the risen Christ. They wouldn’t ever forget how they felt. “Didn’t our hearts burn within us?” they said. And the Gospel says “they returned to Jerusalem with great joy.”

Do you see the connection? God and joy. Christ and joy. Somehow all of our little joys are caught up in the greater joy of knowing God and being in Christ. It isn’t that they aren’t real in themselves. It’s just that they receive their fullness, their real amplitude, when we see that they’re all somehow connected to God.

Jacques Lacan, a renowned French psychoanalyst, has given a name to this kind of joy. He calls it juissance—which can be translated as “extravagant or overweening joy.” The greatest kind of joy there is! The kind of joy that changes our lives. Joy that casts everything in a new light. Joy that transforms everything, even our worst sorrows and disappointments.

Let me tell you about my friend Millard Reed. Millard is president-emeritus of Trevecca University in Nashville. Millard was on a speaking trip in South Carolina when he suddenly fell ill and was rushed to the hospital. His liver had just stopped functioning. His system was shutting down. The doctors said he would die. But a lot of people prayed for Millard, and when the doctors found a new liver for him and installed it, he began to recover.

One day, when Millard was back in Nashville at home, he was feeling a little depressed and he decided to go for a walk around his neighborhood. It was springtime and there were flowers growing in a neighbor’s yard. Millard stopped to look at them. A bumblebee was buzzing from one blossom to another. Millard knew about bumblebees and how aerodynamically challenged they are, with those heavy, cumbersome bodies and the tiny, insubstantial little wings. But suddenly this bumblebee did something truly amazing. It headed straight at Millard. And then before it got to him, it suddenly did a perfect loop-de-loop, like a stunt plane, and went back to the flower where it had started!

This took Millard totally by surprise. He remembered the Book of Job, and how God at one point had asked Job if he could make a horse or if he could make a whale or any of the other magnificent creatures God that God had put in the world. Millard said he could almost hear God saying aloud to him, “Millard, if I could make that crazy bumblebee do that, I could give you a new liver.” And Millard began to cry. He was still crying when he went back to his house a few minutes later. His wife was alarmed. She thought something was wrong. “Oh no, honey,” Millard said, “these aren’t tears of sadness, these are tears of joy. I am so happy to be alive in God’s beautiful world!”

This is what I’ve been trying to say. You and I have a lot of little joys if we only take the time to notice them. Our days are actually full with them. And all those little joys become amplified and connected when we see them within the greater joy of knowing that God made the world, and that God was somehow, in Christ, redeeming the world. Just thinking about it can make your heart burn within you, the way it did for those disciples from Emmaus, and the way it did for my friend Millard. It’s like having juissance— extravagant joy—all the time!

 

Conversation with John Killinger

Daniel Pawlus: John, it’s so good to have you with us as always.

John Killinger: Thank you.

Pawlus: I love how you started your message defining the difference between joy and pleasure in society. Do you think we’re just over stimulated by everything out there and it makes it more difficult to get or appreciate joy?

Killinger: That’s an interesting thought, Dan. I expect it’s true. Our Zen Buddhist friends would say that because they believe that spareness of life helps us to enjoy all of it more.

Lydia Talbot: John, I love the word juissance in your message, from the French psychoanalyst. What have been those juissance, transforming kinds of joys, life changing joys? What have been those of juissance in your own life?

Killinger: Well, I expect there would be too many of them to tell you about all of them. This morning when I was waiting to come out to the studio here, I wandered downtown Chicago in the open air market there and as I walked around under the big Calder sculpture there and saw all these booths with colorful vegetables and flowers and sunflowers and big purple flowers—I didn’t know what they were—and gladioli and all of that. I had these sense, you know, of being in the Garden of Eden or something and I thought about it then that once you’ve experienced juissance, that extravagant joy, you can tap into it almost anywhere you are. Someone began a book by quoting a Roshi, a Buddhist Roshi, who said it’s very deep to have a cup of tea. You can have that feeling, I think, even with a cup of tea. It can be anywhere. But it’s very wonderful when it finally all gets connected. I couldn’t say precisely where it happened to me. Maybe you could in your own life. Do you remember a moment in your life?

Talbot: Well, what you’re saying is your antenna are always up, that receptivity. Do I remember? Yeah. Just yesterday I received a card with a butterfly on it from my friend who has a life-threatening illness and is in a New York hospital. But she was joy filled and grateful and thought of me and sent me that card with a butterfly which she knows I like.

Killinger: And the butterfly, as a symbol of resurrection or transformation, coming out of the larvae is a wonderful symbol of joy, isn’t it? I mean that fluttering, unlike the bumblebee! It has a kind of transparency and lightness of being and it always reminds us of ethereal things, doesn’t it?

Pawlus: Well, you reminded us of always seeing the connection with joy and God and how important that is in life. You know, it just reminds me of the deeper sense to feel real joy usually is emotion for me or it’s an experience rather than something that’s intellectual necessarily.

Killinger: Exactly.

Pawlus: Would you agree with that?

Killinger: Yes. Who was it? Maslow, who used to talk about the peak experiences of the person, being those moments when all of our faculties come together and do what they do at their best like a player on the gridiron who catches that unbelievable ball nobody thought he could catch, but everything was coordinated to do it. And I think it has to do with peak experiences of the soul when we reach beyond all rational things, we reach beyond all physical circumstances to claim that sense of being united with all, with God and the world, and with all the things that give us joy.

Talbot: And so often that kind of joy comes at as a surprise, doesn’t it?

Killinger: Yes.

Talbot: I think of the title C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, the woman who eventually gave meaning to his life and in marriage.

Killinger: Right. Yes. But I think he meant the double entendre there that he intended it to be more than just his wife, Joy. Surprised by God’s joy that came into his life. I found myself asking as I walked around the market this morning, “Would I appreciate this as much, would I be having this joy if I didn’t believe in God?” I think an atheist or an agnostic can have joy but how much deeper it is when you feel that it’s all somehow connected in God. And as Alfred North Whitehead once said that God is a careful thought that nothing be lost. God preserves everything. God preserves all our joys somehow.

Pawlus: He calls us to joy, too. He wants us to experience joy in our life, doesn’t he?

Killinger: I think so and beyond all circumstances.

Pawlus: Absolutely.

Talbot: Isn’t it harder than ever in this market culture in which we live to know that people get the difference between God centered joy and the next acquisition?

Killinger: That’s right. Yes, I think so. In fact I saw some little old ladies down in the market place this morning handing out brochures about a demonstration that was going to be held there and they were very big into peace and unity in the world. And I fell into talking with one of them and she talked about how busy people are rushing to work and they won’t even look at her brochures about enjoying life and having peace because they’re too busy in the marketplace.

Talbot: And so sunshine should always be more important than our next acquisition?

Killinger: Oh, I think yes.

Talbot: Your new book, God’s People at Prayer.

Killinger: It’s just a book of prayers for ministers to use on Sunday morning.

Talbot: Wonderful. Because they don’t have time.

Killinger: That’s right. They are busy!

Talbot: Thank you, John Killinger.

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