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What is joy? (with a few words on "Bowling for Columbine")
By Steve Lansingh | When I was young, my Bible teachers made a point of differentiating between "happiness" and "joy." Happiness was an emotional state, they told me, which could come and go at any time. Joy was an established state that persisted through the ups and downs of life. Rooted in God, joy was constant even through the tragedies and pains of this world.
Therefore, joy seemed to me something like irrational merriment. Or an oblivious cheer. Or perpetual chipperness. Plain old happiness looked pretty good in comparison.
It wasn't until years later that I would stumble upon a definition that, for me, would work better. I had just graduated from college and was getting my first taste of the real world, and my sister was just beginning college. Her first year went badly, and she felt trapped. The tests and papers and homework mounted up as she got sick, which got her depressed, which added more backlog. I tried to convince her that there was a world outside college, a world where GPAs were of little importance, where studying was not the only valuable skill, where dorms were not the normal living situation. But it was hard for her to see more than one semester ahead, let alone four years ahead.
I began to see that the enemy of joy was a sort of tunnel-vision, where the weight of the world rested on that next step. It wasn't just confined to school, either; when I would obsess over the words and tone of something someone said to me, when I let my job overwhelm me to the point of physical exhaustion, when I would analyze a relationship to death. This kind of small-picture thinking always led to a death of joy. The only escape was a big-picture view, a stepping back and seeing a wider slice of the world. Joy is an immersion in the fullness of life, into the abundance and sufficiency of God. Joy is being alive to the vastness of our world and the vastness of time, and fully participating in both. To lack joy leads to hoarding, to pettiness, to stonewalling. To have joy would look something like selfless abandon.
What does any of this have to do with "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore's documentary about the problem of gun violence in America? Well, he doesn't come right out and say so, but in searching for an answer he points his finger somewhere near where I've put joy.
Matt Stone, the co-creator of "South Park" and a former student at Columbine High School, posits a theory of "school tunnel vision" much the same as mine. He complains that schools put too much pressure on kids to measure up, threatening that a misstep in high school will limit the range of colleges, which limits the range of jobs, and so forth, so one's entire future is mapped out. In short, if you're a success in high school, you'll be a success for good, but if you're a loser at that age, you'll be a loser your whole life. He wishes somebody had been able to reach the two killers and just let them know that the world outside high school is so much bigger than they knew.
Moore transitions from this into a segment comparing American society to other countries where death-by-firearms is quite rare -- including our next-door neighbor, Canada. His theory is that Canada, by and large, isn't nearly as afraid as we are. At least in the town he was in, few people locked their doors -- even people who had been robbed before. He chalks it up to the messages sent by the media and the politicians. In America, he says, a politician gets elected by stirring up fear of whatever he or she is promising to fix. The media stirs up fear with its reporting to better serve advertisers who sell a carefree lifestyle.
The biggest error Moore makes in his film is by choosing these scapegoats. (He even tries to talk a producer of "Cops" out of making his show.) Any scapegoats take the blame off the individual to consider his or her role in the tragedies. It would have been far better if Moore had simply taken our culture of fear as a starting point to help us learn how to cope with it. In other words, after depicting America's fear, its smallmindedness, its hoarding of its things, its petty conflicts, and its walling out of its neighbors -- its lack of joy, to use my terms -- he could have sought ways of overcoming such obstacles. Instead of asking "How can we stamp out fear?" (which leads to fear of fear itself), a more useful question might be "How can we create joy?"
This is a question every Christian and every church body must consider. Are our words aimed at stamping out the fears of rejection, the fears of failure, the fears of temptation? Or are they aimed at holding up a picture of something to strive for, an expansive vision of the world where the things we insulate ourselves with, and the pettiness we cling to, are swept away?
The singer Rich Mullins had a way of connecting people to this vision that was very pure -- "a very unique encouragement technique," according to his biography. "When he counseled people who were depressed, he told them to walk around their neighborhoods and learn the name of every tree. Rich believed that if people could get outside of their little shells of pre-occupation, they could be healed of a lot of problems. They might, he surmised, see the wonder of God in the power of an oak or the beauty of a redbud. They might, just for a moment, forget their troubles (which are often self-imposed) and catch a vision of something larger and more enduring. And maybe in that simple act they would become free."
The Scriptures offer the ultimate expanded view: God "will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." To be able to see beyond high school, beyond career and marriage -- and even beyond death -- can free a person from daily disappointments. The assurance of that final destination helps open up the pathway to joy. We discover that a plunge into God's abundance is more than just something to aspire to; it something that one day must be.
(Addendum 12/2/02: Perhaps I should have paired these thoughts with next summer's Jim Carrey movie "Bruce Almighty". In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Carrey describes the moral of his movie, in which his character is challenged to play God for one day, as follows: "The thing that happens to human beings is they get so tunnel visioned, they have that one thing in their head they want to get ... they suddenly forget all the other gifts God has given them!" Tune in next summer to catch my thoughts on how well the movie lives up to that promise.)
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