Choose Hard-Earned Joy Instead of Cynicism
Paul Prather
4 min read ⭑
And so, friends, we find ourselves again amid the season when we’re called to give thanks, to celebrate joy unspeakable and full of glory, to count our blessings.
Of course we might give thanks and be filled with joy the whole year. But we forget. We get distracted. We grow tired, cross and hard-bitten. Irritations grind us down. Then November and December roll around to remind us — no, wait! Look up! Give praise! Enjoy!
The other day I found myself listening to a sermon about joy on YouTube.
The preacher was Rob Bell, a well-known hipster evangelical who got in hot water a few years back because non-hipster evangelicals thought he’d drifted off into universalism. Universalism is the idea that in the final estimation everybody of every faith or no faith at all will end up going to heaven. It’s never been clear to me whether Bell actually was or is a universalist, because his responses to the charges seemed coy and evasive.
Unsplash+
But I don’t care. At my age I don’t give a rip who’s doctrinally pure enough for the purity meisters. That’s a subject that bores me.
Anyway, Bell is surely among the more magnetic public speakers ever. I listened to his riveting 2020 sermon, “An Introduction to Joy.”
One part especially perked up my ears. He contrasted joy with cynicism. Cynicism, he said, “is so easy and lazy.”
That reminded me of a conversation I had with a fellow journalist in 1987 at a center for media studies. Her background was different from mine. She was Jewish and agnostic; I was Christian and a preacher. We ended up in a discussion about faith.
She didn’t have a sense there was a God, she said. “But I’m not a nihilist. Nihilism is too easy.”
I never forgot that.
To me, cynicism and nihilism are kissing cousins. Cynics and nihilists alike take the superficial way out. They get gobsmacked by the tougher dimensions of life — corruption, injustice, suffering, hypocrisy — then recoil in horror and hide behind a facade of apathy, judgment and snark.
“Cynicism dips its toe in the pool of the heavy,” Bell said. “Cynicism skirts the outer edges of the heaviness of life.”
It’s faith and joy that require the hard work.
Naturally, faith and joy can be lazy, too, I’d add. Or at least naive: “God is good, all the time! And if I do everything just so, and if I say all the right incantations and keep all the rules, the devil can’t touch me. Hallelujah!”
So you can fall out of that canoe on either side — become a superficial cynic or a superficial joy monger.
But back to true joy and gratitude. To find them, you first have to embrace the world as it is. You must endure searing loss, evil and betrayal. You can’t hide from pain behind a wall of bitterness, and you can’t ward it off with religious incantations. To get to the joy, you must travel through the suffering and come out the other side.
Bell cited the dark biblical book of Ecclesiastes, which begins, “The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem: ‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’”
“This is why joy is not threatened by pain, loss, angst, betrayal. Joy wraps its arms around the full spectrum of the human experience. The joy is found in going all the way into the heaviness of it so that you can come out the other side.”
Our lives are but vapors, the Teacher goes on to say. We’ll all die and be forgotten. Everything we build turns to dust. There’s no lasting satisfaction in our accomplishments. The unjust are rewarded with long lives, while the good often die young. Life stinks.
(And all people said: Glad you could cheer us up there, Teacher. Thanks.)
But Bell’s argument was that this is the Truth. It can lead to a wisdom that, paradoxically, produces transcendent joy and gratitude.
Only by realizing how short, fragile and unfair life is, how devastating the falls can be, do we also realize how precious and fleeting good times are — and enjoy them to the hilt.
I’ll offer a personal example. I so love being with my grandchildren. Hardly anything gives me as much unabashed, almost delirious delight.
A highlight of my week is taking one of my granddaughters on Thursdays to her horseback riding lesson and then to McDonald’s to pick up junk food for her and her siblings.
I take the kids on occasional shopping sprees. They talk and joke and try to finagle me into buying them expensive mass-marketed trifles they don’t need. It’s all joy.
But for me, much of the richness of these outings derives from my bone marrow-deep recognition that I’m aging and not long for the world. We’re all vapors, the kids and Papa alike. The jaunts won’t last. I’ll blink and they’ll be off at college, or married and moved to another state. Or I’ll be in a rest home.
Does knowing we’ll part make me sad? I can’t even tell you how much. I have no vocabulary for it.
But the same knowledge multiplies my joy and gratitude, too. I savor every hour with them. Knowing the happy moments we share are brief, I milk the time for all it’s worth.
“This is why joy is not threatened by pain, loss, angst, betrayal. Joy wraps its arms around the full spectrum of the human experience,” Bell said. “The joy is found in going all the way into the heaviness of it so that you can come out the other side.”
That other side is lightness, exhilaration and thanksgiving.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.
