Concerning Joy

We've been talking in my Asian philosophy class about Buddhism, and about the difference between pleasure and joy. I disagree with the Dammapada about the specifics of where one finds joy--in Buddhism joy is found in the complete cessation of all strong desire/craving, whereas I would say that desire/craving doesn't need to be stifled, it needs rather to be directed towards the Creator (as opposed to the creation). Since Buddhism is basically non-theistic, I suppose I agree with it as much as I can given its presuppositions. It's pretty difficult to talk about desiring God without first positing His existence.

This isn't an analysis of Buddhism though. I only mention it because the discussion in class about pleasure versus joy has gotten me thinking about the latter. Where do you find joy? It's a good question, I think, and an important one.

First, what is joy? I'm not prepared (or particularly inclined) to give a definitive philosophical and/or theological response to this question. All I'm talking about here is how the experience (as opposed to the condition) of joy manifests to me. Joy here means a sense of peace, of contentment. It's a sort of happiness that exists perfectly within itself. When I'm joyful I'm completely present (a rare enough occurance); I'm not at all concerned about what's going to happen five years, or even five minutes in the future. What follows is a list of places or activities where I can usually or frequently find joy...or be found by joy, rather.

Today, as usual, I rode my bike a mile and half up the hill to class in the morning. Riding my bike gives me joy; more than the exercise, more than the time and gas I save, more than the reduction in my "environmental footprint" I ride because it gives me joy. This afternoon as I coasted down the hill, coming home from class, it began to rain. Not hard, but definitely more than a sprinkle. It rained on me all the way home; I was sopping wet by the time I rolled up in my driveway. I haven't been that happy in a long, long time. I'm sure I looked like an idiot to every motorist I passed, riding my bike down Hutchison Street with rain running down my big fat grinning face.

Strange as it sounds, a good Mexican food dinner gives me joy. Rogelio's and El Charro are my favorite local places. I can't explain this one, or even elaborate.

I've been finding a lot of joy in prayer lately. This isn't always the case--sometimes prayer is like lifting weights. I've been trying to get in the habit of spending a good chunk of time at the beginning of every day in prayer (I've never been one for regular devotional times, unfortunate as that may be). I've also noticed that days I begin with prayer tend to be generally more joyful/focused/what-have-you. So those of the readership who are yourselves "prayin folk" might send up a text-message or two on my behalf in this regards, that my laziness would not come out on top...

Smoking my pipe can give me a lot of joy. It's so much better (and different) than cigarettes, which I haven't had in coming up on three weeks.

Good conversation with old friends gives me joy.

And above all, going to bed and falling asleep quickly gives me joy...a joy that I think I'm going to go pursue right now.

P.S. I still have more to say about consumerism and identity. I've actually got two posts--one on the personal/psychological side of the issue, and another on the theological. They'll hopefully happen soon.

P.P.S. Update on the demise of Jonathan's blog. Sean discovered that Google had the blog cached, so I went over a couple of nights ago and saved every post Jonathan ever made to a Word document, which is now safely tucked away on the hard drives of myself and a few other people. So if there's some favorite post of yours whose loss you were lamenting, let me know and I'll do my best to hook you up. As it is I'm thinking of compiling some sort of anthology of Tiger Death Fantasies from the archives.

# posted by Daniel at 11:24 PM.

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Blessed are the consumers, for they shall be filled

So I'm a little behind the times here, but I just tonight for the first time watched Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. As is typical of my reaction to Moore, I admire a lot of the film, agreed with a good bit, rolled my eyes at some, and endured the rest. What I found most interesting about the film is that he doesn't seem to come down in favor of gun control laws (the movie, for those of you who haven't seen it, is about American gun culture and gun violence as viewed through the lens of the Columbine high school shootings of a few years ago). I had just assumed he'd be trying to pry my guns out of my (preferably) cold, dead fingers. But he's actually a lifetime member of the NRA. I'm not sure if he joined just so he could cheese Charlton Heston in his own living room, but he seemed to make a big deal in the film about the fact that Canadians own a whole lot of guns but don't kill each other like we Americans do.

What the movie has in the way of a thesis was actually best stated by Marilyn Manson in Moore's interview with the goth rocker. Manson (who never fails to amaze me by being articulate and thoughtful in interviews) said that American culture is defined by fear and consumption. The media, in this view, does everything it can to tell us why we need to be worried and afraid. News reports focus on crime, death, murder, and black people. We watch shows like Cops (more on that in a second). Advertisers make billions of dollars by providing us with cures or solutions to our fears, whether those be burglars or bad breath. The rhetoric surrounding both our domestic and foreign policy is geared to make us feel that we ought to be scared. The drug pushers are going to turn our children into crack whores, so we better go to war on drugs. The public schools are turning out illiterate troglodytes; we'd better declare war on illiteracy. Killer Africanized bees are swarming north from central America...we'd better do something (I actually remember reading about Africanized bees when I was in middle school and being seriously freaked out at the thought that they might eventually make it to Texas). Terrorists blew up the World Trade Center; they could be hiding in your toilet right now, waiting to goose you in the arse with an anthrax needle. We need a Patriot Act and billions of dollars to build planes and defend the homeland. You get the idea. Make us afraid enough and we'll do anything at all to stop being afraid. We'll buy pretty anything, that's for sure.

This issue goes far beyond gun violence. As Americans we define ourselves largely by what we buy, by the products we use and the places we spend our money. And our patterns are driven largely (not exclusively, but largely) by fear. We're afraid of being unpopular (by the standards of the crowd with which we identify), or unhygenic, or undesireable, or unsafe, or ignorant, or, well, dead. We carve out a little identity niche at an intersection of a few demographic charts--and we do anything to protect our place in that niche. Because if we don't consume what we're expected to (what we expect ourselves to) consume, then we don't quite exist (this is the Cartesian baseline of a modern capitalist society. I consume, therefore I exist).

The sermon at church this morning came from the first two chapters of Genesis. The series our pastor just started is an ambitious, year-long trek through the Bible, and the overarching theme is that of seeing my personal story in light of God's larger story; i.e. interpreting my particularity & experience in the knowledge of His larger purposes in creation and redemption. For the sermon this morning the idea was understanding that my value and worth comes as a result of being created by God in the image of God, not from anything that I'm told or fed by other people, even if those other people happen to live behind glass in the plastic box in my living room. A diverse trinity of books (Carl Jung's The Undiscovered Self, Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, and Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live?) I've read in the last couple of years explore the same idea--the unique power of religion (specifically Christianity, although it could in fairness be said of other major religions) to empower the individual to resist the influence of what Jung described as the collective mind or mass mentality that manifests in contemporary society as the impulse to define oneself by what one consumes. Schaeffer in particular develops the idea that the traditional Christian belief in a personal God who has revealed something of Himself in the scriptures gives the individual an infinite reference point when relating to society; when one truly allows themselves to be defined by God then one cannot be defined by society. Very few, even among us who believe (or try to believe), actually succeed in defining ourselves this way, but the possibility is there, and any improvement is progress.

I could ramble on about this forever, but it's now two in the A. M. and I have class in the morning. Good night America, and all the ships at sea.

# posted by Daniel at 11:56 PM.

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