Take Joy!

Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, December 6, 2009

Reading

from Ecstasy: Understanding the Psychology of Joy by Robert Johnson

Dionysus lives in some strange places these days. He lives in the thrill we experience when we read about the latest terrorist bombing, the latest arson fire, the latest political assassination. As we sit calmly reading our morning paper, we hear the screech of brakes and a crash. Unbidden, we feel an enormous rush of energy. Cold chills go up and down our spine, we say, “How awful!—and run outside to see the accident.

This is poor-quality Dionysus; this is what happens to a basic human drive that has not been [fully[ lived out for nearly two thousand years…

Craving spiritual ecstasy, we mistakenly seek material fulfillment. We chase after a phantom, and when we catch it—in the form of more money, more food, more sex, more drugs, more drinks, more oblivion—we find that we have been chasing ephemeral happiness when we should have invited lasting joy… We have chosen the quick fix over… spiritual nutrition… and we are starving because of it.

The Sermon by Rev. Jeffrey B. Symynkywicz

            As you might imagine, I am rather eclectic and wide-ranging in my reading habits. I read—a lot. If the truth be told, I probably also read a lot of stuff that other people might not find, frankly, all that interesting.

            But I am thrilled when, in my voluminous reading, I come across material that I can inflict—I mean share—with all of you. I know you’re just itching to hear the most pithy and entertaining insights drawn from, say, my reading on the Rosenberg case, or the great influenza epidemic of 1918, or The Ebbing of European Ascendancy: The International History of the World, 1914-1945, or other exciting topics like that.

            For example, I recently finished a book titled Stand Facing the Stove, a biography of the Erma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, the two women responsible for the classic cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. (I know: File this under “Biblical Studies” for those of us who like to cook; file it under “Boring” for those of you who don’t.)

            One of the things that most impressed me about this book, when I’d finished it, was how little joy there was in the story of the Joy of Cooking. (I know that some of you might be wondering how much “joy” there can be in cooking—period—but some of us find a great deal of joy in cooking, so to each, his or her own, I guess.)

Certainly, The Joy of Cooking has been a phenomenal success, by any measurement: It has sold something like 18 million copies since Mrs. Rombauer had the first edition (3000 copies) published privately in 1936. It made both Mrs. Rombauer and her daughter, Mrs. Becker, financially very well-off (if not fantastically wealthy), and provided for the financial stability of their family for generations to come.

            But along the way, there was a husband’s suicide, lawsuits, family discord, a mess of illnesses, falling out with friends, arguments with Bobbs-Merrill, their publisher (lots of those). Mrs. Rombauer even had a sour stomach when she went to visit Julia Child in France one day in the early 1960s, so she couldn’t eat any of the lunch Julia and her cohorts had prepared for her. How bad can it get?

            “Where’s the joy?” I kept asking myself as I trudged on through the book’s 400 or 500 pages.

            But of course, so much of life isn’t joy, plain and simple. If the truth be told, Irma Rombauer’s life probably wasn’t that much more tragedy-laden than those of many of us. Most of us, I’d wager, have had (or will have) our share of illnesses and discord and strife and disappointments—even if our books haven’t sold as many copies as hers has.

            It’s only in juxtaposing her life (as it really was), with the joy her magnum opus promised, that we sense a bit more pathos.

            It’s not that we really expect life to be “nothing but blue skies from now on”. But still, there is this yearning for joy deep within us; this yearning for what our Greek ancestors would have called ecstasy.

            Maybe it’s time for us to welcome Dionysus—the god of joy-- back into our personal pantheons.

            Our civilization praises—and values—that which is orderly. Modern science has instilled within us the belief that we ought not to trust something that can’t be weighed and measured and bought and sold. “Our world is built on thinking, logic, progress, and success,” Robert Johnson has written in his book on the psychology of joy, “and within these limits we feel secure.”

            But joy transcends these limits. Joy is an aspect of what Fritjof Capra calls “the dancing universe— the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns.” Genuine joy joins us again with the dance of ancient and elemental powers; it opens us to the magnificent life force flowing through us; it unites our consciousness with a deeper, collective consciousness that lies beyond “seeing is believing”.

            The heavy hand of authority—be it Roman, Jewish, Christian, or Humanist—cannot completely kill the spirit of Dionysus within us. We touch the energy of deep joy when we look into the eyes of one we love and feel the connecting life force that is beyond time and space. We touch Dionysus—or rather, Dionysus touches us—when we are moved to tears by a piece of music, or when we move beyond our own self consciousness, and are joined with others in a great dance, or some other common endeavor, or when we spontaneously leap to our feet and shout for joy at a sports event. Dionysus lives within us whenever we feel the deep, rich, wine-red blood flowing and pulsating through our bodies.

            We apprehend the spirit of Dionysus through the world of the senses—the world of the poet, the artist, the dreamer—those who pint the way toward the Spirit—those who open our senses and our souls to our deeper possibilities.

            This isn’t the same thing as living for sensual pleasure alone. It’s not the same as clinging to physical gratification as the only thing that matters. But it does mean liberating ourselves from always living in the prison of our mental selves. It means learning to see the world in ways that are more than rational. It means trying to commune with life instinctively, intuitively, with our whole beings, rather than just in our heads.

            Taking joy in life means opening ourselves to ecstasy. There’s a loaded term if there ever was one. Say the word “ecstasy” in the context of our present culture, and one pictures either drugs or sex—or maybe both!

            But the actual etymology of the word “ecstasy” is from the Greek ex stasis, which means “to stand outside of oneself”, to go beyond oneself. To be ecstatic is to be filled with an emotion too powerful for our bodies to contain or for our minds to understand.

            But, as Robert Johnson writes:

            “I am sorry to say that we rarely stand outside of ourselves these days. The world is too much with us. We are constantly working, thinking, planning, doing—what to eat, where to go, how to support our families, for whom to vote. All the responsibility and power we burden ourselves with! We can’t bear it for very long without breaking down in some way.”

            As an antidote to all that duty and responsibility, we need the freedom of joy. We need to “Take joy!”. “Joy to the world!” we sing. And “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee.” But how we have watered down that joy… It has become just one more commodity to be purchased: The Joy of Cooking; The Joy of Fly Fishing; The Joy of … whatever.

            (One of my favorite stories of all time is about librarian at this Catholic girl’s high school in the Midwest somewhere, who mistakenly ordered (and received) 50 copies of The Joy of Sex, rather than The Joy of Cooking.  Which means very little in the context of this present sermon, except, as I said, it’s one of my favorite stories of all time. Boy, I sure would have liked to see that librarian’s face when she opened that box!)

            But to really have joy in life, we need more than recipe books, or training manuals about how to do certain things. What we need are opportunities to experience the holy, the sacred, the mysterious, and the wondrous within the time we still have left to us on this earth.

            That means finding a place for Dionysus in our lives again.

You might well ask how he got lost in the first place.

Interestingly,  Dionysus was the last god to be added to the Greek pantheon, and the first to be de-throned. The cult of Dionysus reached its zenith in ancient Greece, in the years between 700 and 400 BCE. The ancient Greeks celebrated their festival of Dionysus in the springtime, when the grapevine was just starting to sprout leaves. For five days, all business came to a halt. Worship of Dionysus was moved out of the temple, where the worship of other gods and goddesses took place, and into the theater; it took the form of a sacred play. From these plays, classical Greek theater evolved: The joyous celebration of the resurrection of Dionysus eventually gave rise to comedy; the sadness felt at his death eventually became tragedy.

All seemed to be going pretty well in the land of Dionysus… But then came the Romans. Almost immediately, Dionysus, the god of wine (among other things) was transformed into Bacchus, the god of drunkenness. (And that’s not the same thing, not at all.) By the year 186 of the Common Era, the Romans lost all patience with the irrational debauchery of the followers of Bacchus, and launched a full-scale persecution. Thousands of followers of Bacchus were charged with all sorts of crimes against the social order, and many were summarily executed. The Roman senate banned the bacchanalia, and, in Robert Johnson’s words, “Dionysus has not been seen in polite company since.”

In his place, the Romans elevated Apollo, the god of light. Where Dionysus was seen as irrational, Apollo was super-rational. While Dionysus extolled the spontaneous and exuberant, Apollo represented law and order. Where Dionysus was a god who arose, like the grapevine, directly from the earth, Apollo was completely detached from the earth, high up in the sky, as remote as the sun. Later, under Jewish and Christian authorities, Dionysus would fare even worse, and his image—the goat—would come to be associated with the Devil, with the very face of evil itself.

But as Jungian psychology point out, the gods and goddesses of ancient myth actually represent archetypes—models, deep within our psyches. Each one represents some aspect of our collective humanity. You can’t kill an archetype. You can’t pass laws banning it. You can never eliminate within us the urge, the energy, which that god or goddess represents. So it is with Dionysus.

But remember what the Romans did at first with Dionysus: they replaced him with Bacchus. They replaced the god of wine with the god of drunkenness. That’s the line of succession which or culture has followed. We have replaced joy with addiction. “Craving spiritual ecstasy, we mistakenly seek material fulfillment. We chase after a phantom, and when we catch it—in the form of more money, more food, more sex, more drugs, more drinks, more oblivion—we find that we have been chasing ephemeral happiness when we should have invited lasting joy… We have chosen the quick fix over… spiritual nutrition… and we are starving because of it.”

Change comes hard for us human ones.

But that it comes at all is a truly amazing grace.

There is also within the human spirit “that love which will not let us go”—that urge to live fully—to LIVE!—and not just to drift about on the surface of things, dazed and confused, barely half awake. That means daring to invite Dionysus back to our spiritual feast.

Not at the expense of Apollo, necessarily. Not at the expense of those aspects of modern society—those areas of science and reason and technology and structure—which can be made to serve the cause of beauty and truth and our deeper humanity. Personal transformation in and of itself, however deep and well meaning, will never by itself transform society. Dionysus needs Apollo as a partner in that endeavor.

But it is time to invite back the child inside each of us. Children are natural Dionysians. Some of us might feel as though we were born Apollos—as though we have lived inside our heads from the age of two, and that we need a support group like “Apollonians Anonymous” to get us out of there. Sometimes, we need to listen to that oft-derided and denigrated inner child. And we need to listen to the real children around us, and learn from them.

            It’s time, too, to invite the arts back into our lives. Thank God for the musicians and artists and poets who never lost touch with the Dionysian energy within. Imagine what a dreary world it would be without them! As a society, we can invite Dionysus back to the feast by affirming that art is not just an appendage to life—not just a plaything of the wealthy—but a basic manifestation of our humanity.

            And we can foster our own creative spirits, and get in touch with the “artist within” as well. Every person can be an artist, because every person is gifted with some manifestation of the creative spirit in the universe.

            It is time to invite ritual back into our lives. Living, real rituals which form the bridge between the daily lives we lead day in, day out, and the deeper meanings our lives represent. Ritual reminds us that we can’t just talk about joy—we must take joy—and bring it back into our lives.

            Take joy—by listening to our dreams.

            Take joy—by listening to each other’s stories.

            Take joy—by listening to ancient voices of wisdom.

            Take joy—by listening to the spirit of joy deep within our souls.

            Take joy—by welcoming joy, with all our souls, and all our spirits, and all our senses, and all our bodies and our lives—back into this world, back into this dear, dear life we are called to live.

| Home | Sermons and Meditations | Archived Sermons |