Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Something More Than Happiness
February 29, 2004
Palo Alto, CA
Reverend Amy Zucker

In the "New UU" class last fall, where newcomers learn about Unitarian Universalism and our congregation to newcomers, we introduced the seven principles that we as a Unitarian Universalist congregation covenant to affirm and promote, and asked the participants what they thought of them. Did any strike them as not belonging? Were there any principles that did belong there but didn't appear among the seven?

One of the participants, Adam __, looked at the list and answered without hesitation. There was one principle missing, he said: that we celebrate joy.

I looked at the list again. Surely that was in there somewhere . . . it was so obvious, so right! But no, it wasn't there. I thought some more. Was it properly considered a principle? Sure we want to celebrate joy, and we do (though we could do so more often), but does it belong among the things we wish to affirm and promote, such as "respect for the interdependent web of existence"? Yes, it does. It most certainly does–and until such time as the Principles are revised, I'll have Adam's footnote in my mind. To me, the celebration of joy is not only something we do and ought to do, but it goes to the very heart of what it means to walk on this earth and live this life.

What is joy? What does it mean to celebrate it as a community? We celebrate happy events–share our lives with one another and smile with each other's good fortune. All of that is a very important part of being a church, and in fact a very important part of being human. Happiness and joy are not the same thing, however.

Happiness, it seems to me, is situational. Things happen the way we wish them to and we are happy; they fail to and we are sad. Happiness is temporary, the state we are in when sorrow is far from our minds.

Joy is different: more permanent, less dependent on the situation at hand. Happiness is a flower; joy, a tree, whose skin is thick, whose roots go deep and keep it standing through winter, through storms, through high winds and long drought. It is not the absence of sorrow, but a deep harmony, a sense of the rightness of things in spite of sorrow's very real presence. A deathbed is almost never a happy place, but it can often be a joyful one: a place where ultimate beauty and goodness shine through our tears. In fact, Djuna Barnes wrote, "The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy."

Jack spoke so beautifully of the joy in listening to music, a joy beyond happiness, a joy that is as much longing as the satisfaction of a longing. Perhaps such a moments has come to you when listening to music as well, or walking in a beautiful place, or contemplating an elegant equation, or looking into the eyes of someone whom you love so much that you feel that if they died, you could not survive to draw another breath. Joy is in those moments where, right in the midst of turmoil, the choppy waters grow still, the ripples quiet down, and one sees right down to the bottom of the ocean. Have you ever known a moment like that? - a moment when, fully aware of all that is not right with the world and your own life, your heart wants to sing, "And all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well"?

What are we to do at such moments, when our hearts overflow? As a culture, we aren't too comfortable with expressions of joy. Big smiles on happy occasions are okay. But try giving expression to one of those revelatory moments of deep harmony and you're likely to get a funny look. Children can do that kind of thing; adults, we're told, keep their feelings on an even keel. (When they aren't on an even keel, for heaven's sake don't show them. We'll all be so embarrassed on your behalf.)

I remember a day when I was just 9 or 10 years old and came home from school to find that the crocuses had bloomed. After the long Connecticut winter, spring was finally in sight - the first color at last peeping through the snow. I knelt down on our sidewalk to smell them and look with happy love into the delicate cups of purple and gold. My next-door neighbor, a boy from my class, looked at me oddly: one of many times in my life I've gotten the message that the expression of joy is uncool. Maybe you've gotten that message too?

Has it inhibited you? I recently confessed to a friend who loves musical theater that I couldn't get too into an art form where people just spontaneously break into song and dance. It seemed so unrealistic. He said, "But wouldn't the world be a better place if people did?" I had to admit, it really would. Henceforth I will stop being embarrassed to act on my impulse to sing "Singin' in the Rain" when it pours. I'd like to say I'll tap dance, too, but I don't know how. What I do know is that when the rain comes down the way it did last week, I want to swing from the lightposts just like Gene Kelly, and darn it, why not do it?

This social pressure to keep our joy to ourselves is one of the main reasons we so badly need communities that affirm and promote the celebration of joy. We need this community to be one where we can always express the joy we feel. Anne Sexton wrote, "The joy that isn't shared dies young." Here we can promise each other that we'll never laugh or give each other funny looks for being too exuberant. We'll nurture that joy and keep it alive.

The other biggest reason that our community needs to be one that celebrates joy is that we strive to make it one that confronts injustice. And that is a task that saps the strength if we don't feed our souls with joy.

Tomorrow I'll be at City Hall to bless same-sex couples and just be a part of the celebration, as my colleagues from San Mateo and Los Gatos did on Friday. This looks like it's going to be the wedge issue of choice this election year, and there's a long, grim struggle ahead, like the long, grim struggle for equal rights already behind us. The right to marry is a serious issue, one of life and death, freedom and oppression, and for that very reason we need all the celebrating we can do.

And there is so much to celebrate - we're talking marriage, here! Love, and courage, and faith, and all the best in two people gathered up for one shining moment that we pray will light their path for the rest of their lives. Just the pictures can make you laugh and cry with joy–all that exuberance! Couples waving their certificates, children swinging from their daddies' joined hands, flowers arriving from strangers all over the country (tens of thousands of dollars' worth), the Parks Department trucking in plants to make City Hall a little more festive and City Hall already alive with cheering, laughing families. If we are to carry on the hard work of justice-making and peace-building, we need these kinds of celebrations. People do not live by bread alone–we need chocolate too.

That's why the Peace Umbrella sponsored a Valentine's Day dance, taking as their motto Emma Goldman's sentiment, "I don't want to be part of any revolution where there isn't dancing.¹" Trying to bring about a more peaceful world can be sad, tiring work. We need to reconnect with the beauty in life that not only inspires and energizes us, but is also one of the reasons we care about the future of this world. The God of the Bible told humanity, "I set before you life and death," and urged us, "Choose life!" This life is good and full of joy - that is why we take up the cause of defending it, and it is what gives us cause to celebrate.

And that, my friends, is why I am giving three-quarters of my Social Justice tithe to this congregation: because of all the organizations that work to end injustice and alleviate suffering, this is the one that also invites me to touch my joy, and gives us all a place to share it so that it will not die young but will thrive and keep us young and strong.

The poet Delmore Schwartz said "The world is a wedding"; the writer Sholom Aleichem called life a "great fair." Neither meant that life was a bed of roses - well, if they did, they were full aware of the thorns. But both were raised in a religion that takes joy very seriously, so to speak. Judaism reminds us to pause and express our joy on beholding one of the glories of creation, like a rainbow or a glacier; it has a special blessing for just such occasions. In the Jewish understanding, sex, far from being in disrepute for being so suspiciously enjoyable, is a mitzvah - a commandment - and doubly so on the Sabbath, the holiest day of the week. In the Jewish tradition, joy is holy and the celebration of it as important as any number of laws and rituals. Just as it would be ungracious to come to a wedding and refuse to eat, dance, or listen to the music, one gains no points with God for declining opportunities to rejoice in life. The Talmud says, "In the world to come, we will be asked to give an accounting for each time we saw a feast before us and did not eat.²" It might sound kind of funny for a religion to command us to practice joy - but sometimes we need just that kind of push.

We, too, have a religion that celebrates this life and sings the joys of the world. Thoreau, one of our great prophets, enjoins us to engage life in such a way that we might "not, when [we come] to die, discover that [we] had not lived."

Our principles are all terrific and refer to joy-bringing things such as acceptance of one another, world peace, and the search for truth, but it's true that the principles themselves are a little on the sober side. So I agree with Adam and soberly recommend that we covenant to affirm and promote the celebration of joy both within and outside our congregational life. In other words:

Sing in the shower!

Dance in the street!

Feel the velvet of a rose petal, smell its sweetness!

Kiss your sweetheart!

Hug your friend!

Splash in a puddle!

The world is a wedding, and the wedding feast is spread before us. Dig in!

1.Often quoted as "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution," Goldman apparently said neither. What she did say, in her autobiography, was this:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.

- which certainly expresses the same sentiment as the popular misquote. (Alix Kates Shulman, "Dances with Feminists," Women's Review of Books, Vol. IX, no. 3, December 1991.)