Recently, I’ve delved into the word, the experience, the meaning of joy.
It’s not so easy to define, actually: joy isn’t happiness, and it certainly isn’t a platitude such as “life is good.”
So I threw myself into a cross-section of religious thinkers and scholars, therapists and scientists, culture observers and people on the street who have spent time thinking about joy too.
Curiously, regardless of their angle of experience, “joy” was often equated with “home.”
When a person is joyful, that is, it’s analogous to what one feels when one is at home: ideally anyway, there you experience contentment, safety, familiarity, peace, ease, delight and generous love.
When a person is joyful, it’s analogous to what one feels when one is at home.
I think it tracks.
But, it began to click, if joy is home, then … what of homesickness? Homelessness?
Eventually it dawned on me that when one is out of sorts, or feeling restless or disconnected with who one should be, or living in a way that is inconsistent with how one wants to or is called to do and be, then it’s as if one is homesick: you know where you belong, but for any number of reasons, you aren’t operating from that place.
Taken further, if you have little to no hope; if you know languishing; if you know exhaustion; if you know what it is to be overwhelmed; if you know loneliness but don’t know where to go or have no place to go for community, for constancy, for safety, for peace, for delight, you are homeless.
Joy is not to be found.
We’re soon entering the Easter season, and whatever else you can say about Easter, it’s a season of joy.
Jesus’ resurrection means, as I like to say whenever given a chance, that death is real, but life is “real-er.”
That for sure is reason for endless joy.
But left alone, especially when one feels alone, when one is figuratively or literally living out on the street, it may not be enough.
The promise of a future balm doesn’t salve the present wound, the promise of future joy doesn’t remove the angst of the present now, the promise of an eventual homecoming doesn’t do any good when, in the moment, you need a home—sometimes quite literally—now.
The promise of an eventual homecoming doesn’t do any good when, in the moment, you need a home—sometimes quite literally—now.
But here’s some joyful news: as Easter people, we are baptismal bearers of joy to those who need some.
We are ambassadors of home, the bringers of peace, comfort, safety, contentment, laughter, community, orientation, purpose, identity—joy—to those who are homesick and homeless.
By way of offering actual spaces for the homeless or advocating for policies that benefit them; offering hospitality to the least of these, the most broken of these, the loneliest of these; creating spaces of delight, creativity, warmth, and grace in manifold forms and in many places; and tending to our oikos, our ecology, the earth that is our home, we can be—are called to be—baptized to be repositories of joy and reminders of home.
