A Breath of Fresh Air

"The Peace of Wild Things," by Wendell Berry

Philippians 4:1-9

I’ve been puzzling over Paul’s words here this week.

When I read, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice,” I can’t help but imagine someone coming up to me when I am stressed out or feeling sad and

Saying something like “Turn that frown upside down.”

It does no good for someone to tell me to cheer up as if by some act of the will alone I am not able to feel full of joy.

And I think a lot of this comes from cultural pressures to appear in certain ways.

And if America’s cardinal virtues are productivity, efficiency, and speed –

We can see why melancholy is not something that is socially acceptable.

It is something, then, that we try to fix.  A problem we try to solve.

And so someone comes up to you and says, “Cheer up.”

Which turns out to not be very helpful for someone who is burdened by grief or worry.

But I think this is a symptom of a larger cultural problem.

And that’s that we have lost the deeper understanding of what it means to be joyful.

I’m not saying we don’t know how to have fun.

We know how to have “good times” and we can post pictures of those good times on Facebook.

But I am saying that I don’t think fun and joy are the same thing.

Fun can often function for me as an escape from grief or worry,

If you’ve ever been worried or upset at a party, you have experienced the inability of fun and worry to coexist.

Whereas joy can reside in the midst of sorrow.  It can arise from sorrow like rainbow in the midst of rain. Joy as I understand it is a habit of awareness in the midst of grief or worry.

And so, knowing that Paul is not a 21^st century American, and knowing that he’s not in the position to have too much fun, being in prison and uncertain about his future---

I can’t imagine him saying “Cheer up” in the way that so often people do in order to push away difficulty or suffering.

Rather Paul is saying “rejoice.”  “Take joy in the Lord” – not from a place of comfort, but from a place of difficulty and uncertainty.

And if we quote these words without remembering who is saying them and from where – I think we lose the depth of what Paul means when he talks about joy.

I think joy is a habit of awareness in the midst of grief or worry.

It becomes worry’s undoing not by directly pushing worry away,

But by recalling the context in which the worrier really lives.

It’s a deep breath in which we look around or look within and we remember connections which sustain us.

This is the connections with the ones we love, and those who love us.

And this is the connection to the bounty of the earth.

And in both of these and beyond both of these, our connection to the creator and sustainer of life.

Joy is not a denial of difficulty or stress.

Joy is the deep breath of the heart inhaling again the gift of life and love.

Rejoice in the Lord always – means that in the midst of suffering, in the midst of grief, don’t forget the sustaining presence of God with you and for you, with shepherd love, in the valley, in the shadow.

Joy can be in the midst of tears as it recognizes the beauty of God’s love which unlike our experience of human love, never fades and does not change based on our circumstances or our performance.

Joy is not merely contentment or endurance, joy is the freedom of remembering that God is near.

God is near.

And so Paul can urge us not to be anxious about those things which are burdening us,

But remember, become aware again of the context in which you are feeling this way.

Paul Tillich says that joy is the awareness of what is really real – beyond the illusions that we may be captured by.

Worry and grief create illusions and manifest imagined ideas about the world and about ourselves that are untrue.  But they become a box in which we live and find it difficult to breath.

Worry tells us that it is only by our individual efforts that we will find peace,

Or more practically it is only by our mere exertion of energy that we will ward of scarcity or difficulty,

That we will be successful or secure.

Grief tells us that life has lost its flavor and nothing will restore it, that life is only the tragic, only dying and not life and rebirth.

These illusions born of grief and worry capture the imagination of our minds and the feeling of our hearts and we live in a stifling box of these unrealities.

But the really real is God’s abiding presence.  The fresh air is the picture of the lilies and the birds that Jesus draws our attention to, the wood drake and the great heron that Wendell Berry sees.

And this awareness calls forth our hearts and minds out of the box into the fresh air, the larger context – which is the joy of life as gift.

We are urged to rejoice for the Lord is near.  It is God’s nearness that sets us free, and it is as we practice the awareness of that nearness that we are able to find joy in the everyday experience of difficulties and challenges.

And the practice of that awareness is prayer.

Prayer is not merely a laundry list given over to God – although, honestly sometimes this is what my prayer is – like a rope wound tight spinning down to a place of stillness, sometimes I need to just vent.

And I don’t think this kind of prayer is unimportant.

But stay there after you’ve unwound the rope.  Stay in the presence of God.

And practice imagining the nearness of God.  And practice being aware of the connections you have by love – connections to friends, to a place, to the Divine.

Prayer is the way that we practice the awareness that opens the box and allow us to breath the fresh air, to rejoice.

But prayer  is more than this individual spiritual practice – and much more could be said about prayer and I would love to hear your thoughts about prayer – since I consider myself very much an amateur at the art.

It is an individual spiritual practice, but it’s more.

In the Greek original of this passage we see that Paul is addressing the Philippian community together,

not Philippian individuals alone

his call for them to a renewed awareness of God’s nearness, to a practice of rejoicing, to a habit of mindfulness and prayer in the midst of grief or worry,

is a call to a gathering of sisters and brothers who share in the Spirit and who have joined together as fellow travelers on life’s road.

It is as a community that we are called to live in joy.

This in some ways takes away the pressure.

It’s not as though we are standing in line as the drill sergeant walks down and stares us in the face and wonders why we aren’t joyful.

The context of this encouragement from Paul is the life of the community lived together,

Joys shared, burdens borne together.

You don’t have to exert some massive willpower to overcome your feeling stressed and assure us that you are ok.

Rather, you and I can sit together or take a walk together and you can be stressed and I can be a listening presence and an embodied reminder that you are not alone, that in and through the community of love, God’s love is sustaining us.

Prayer is individual – let your requests be made known to God – but prayer is also a sharing with one another of our lives, our hopes our worries.

We don’t need denial of difficulty, we need invitation to share our experiences with one another without fear of judgment.

Joy is the deep breath that we take together as we become aware again that community is formed in the midst of honesty with love. 

Rejoice in the Lord – not by drumming up some way to deny feelings of worry,

But by remembering again the connections which sustain you.

The deep breath of knowing that we cannot drum up joy in God.

But joy comes as a result of breathing deep the really real –

That love of God which is true, which is honorable, which is just, which is pure, which is pleasing, which is commendable.

And as we breath deep what Wendell Berry calls the grace of the world, the connections that sustain us by God’s loving hand, we find that in that awareness we are less anxious, we are cooled, we are not alone, we are in good company.

And the peace that surpasses all understanding enables our hearts and minds to rest, and we are free.