“The word blessed, which is used in each of the beatitudes is a very special word. It is the Greek word makarios. Makarios is the word which specially describes the gods. In Christianity, there is a godlike joy.
Makarios describes that joy which has its secret within itself, that joy which is serene and untouchable, and self contained, that joy which is completely indpendent of all the chances and the changes of life. The English word happiness gives its own case away. It contains the root hap, which means chance. Human happiness is something which is dependent on the chances and changes of life something which life may give and which life may also destroy. The Christian blessedness is completely untouchable and unassailable. “No one,” said Jesus, “will take your joy from you.” (John 16:22) The beatitudes speak of that joy which seeks us through our pain, that joy which sorrow and loss and pain and grief are powerless to touch. That joy which shines through tears, and which nothing in life or death can take away.”
– William Barclay (The Gospel of Matthew)
Sometimes I wonder if joy is more of an illusion than a reality. Something we manipulate into existence.
Of course, if this is true, and from a certain point of perspective we know this to be true based on how brain and body chemistry works, then it begs certain questions of joys trustworthiness. Is it simply a way of tricking us into avoiding reality? Is it reality on the simple basis that we experience it, therefore it is true? If it is manipulated into existence it becomes an emergent property, held captive to our ability to make it true.
Which of course is where the true issue lies. If joy is something we make true in our lives over and against the realities that such an action is responding to, are we then simply avoiding reality by anchoring ourselves to a lie, creating a different and new reality, or is it simply a fact of our material existence and a means of survival without actual meaning or concern for questions of reality.
As I have found over the years, there is plenty good, rational reasons to play the skeptic and the cynic. The more we are taught to see joy as a matter of potential, or even human potential, the more it is held captive to the illusion. If life is dependent on convincing ourselves of something that is not otherwise true, and if life is dependent on that convincing allowing us to feel in ways that blind us to the blatant truths about our reality, to pretend as though this existence has meaning beyond our circumstances, then we end up living an inevitable contradiction. The irony being that we then call this rational, or iniellectual. An academic exercise of romanticizing suffering, while masking it through appeals to material pleasures.
Which is one of the reasons the Beatitudes has always stood out for me as being so antithetical to the ways we think and feel about matters of joy, or in the case of the Beatitudes, “blessedness”. For Christians this is Torah. A restating of the Law spoken from the mountaintop in the light of Jesus as its fulfillment. Joy is not represented as something bound to circumstances, it functions as a truer reality, one that is revealed as we lay claim to joy which has the power to shape us and renew us as part of that greater reality. This changes the dynamic altogether.
Joy which seeks. Joy which speaks. Joy which shines.
A joy that must exist independent of us in order to be rationally and reasonably true, in order to lay appropriate claim to meaning, in order to have the power to reshape us according to a different reality regardless of our experiences or abilities.
A joy that translates as hope.
The Stories of my Life 