Happiness and Joy

Joy is defined in the dictionary as “a feeling of great pleasure and happiness,” but somehow that doesn’t seem to be sufficient. Joy seems to have a deeper meaning. In Luke’s account of the Christmas story, when the angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds, he didn’t say, “I’ve got good news for you that will make you very happy.” According to the story, the angel said, “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”

So if joy is not the same as being very happy, then what is it? How would I know it when I experience it? Maybe music heard during the Christmas season provides a clue. Let’s say I take two boxes of different sizes and label the larger box Joy and the smaller box Happiness. Then I fill up the larger box with carols such as Silent Night, The First Noel, O Come Emmanuel, In the Bleak Midwinter and the smaller box with songs like Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Jingle Bells, Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Both boxes of Christmas music are well known and when we hear strains coming from either, we know it’s Christmas and that’s good.

But have you ever noticed there’s a somber, almost elegiac quality to many of the carols in the box labeled Joy while the songs coming from the box labeled Happiness are mostly light-hearted and jovial?  When Gabriel shared his message to the shepherds, he knew, being an archangel, that the baby asleep in the manger would one day die while hanging from a cross. Still, in spite of knowing the whole story, Gabriel shared “good tidings of great joy” with the shepherds.  The difference between a carol and a song is where the difference between happiness and joy reveals itself.

Happiness wasn’t a large enough box to hold “the whole story” of everything that takes place in the course of a person’s life. Happiness depends on the nature of events at hand. It’s the positive emotions I feel while in pleasurable circumstances. In the moment or moments when I feel happy, life is happening just as I want it to or as I want to remember it.

Joy, on the other hand, is a box big enough to hold the full length and breadth of human experience and all its varied emotions. Joy, unlike happiness, is not based on the transitory nature of pleasurable circumstances. Joy is based upon love and love flows from the source within us that doesn’t depend for its existence on events and situations. Joy comes from believing this is true of love and living as best as we can in accord with that belief.

Annunciation by Fra Angelico, created ca. 1430-1440