The Heart of Joy: Soliloquies on Sorrow

Notes For the Reformation: an Appendix, Part VII: The Rediscovery of Joy

There is another power, immaterial too, flowing from the spirit, remaining in the spirit, altogether spiritual. In this power God is fiery, aglow with all His riches, with all His sweetness and all His bliss.

Truly, in this power there is such great joy, such vast unmeasured bliss that none can tell of it or reveal it fully.

Yet I declare that if ever there were a single man who in intellectual vision and in truth should glimpse for a moment the bliss and the joy therein, then all his sufferings and all God intended that he should suffer would be a trifle, a mere nothing to him - in fact I declare it would be pure joy and comfort to him.

—Meister Eckhart, Sermon 8

The difficulty of understanding joy begins with the fact that we confuse exuberant ordinary emotion with joy. One might say we conflate it with excessive happiness; and of course, to be pleased, glad, delighted, elated, ecstatic, euphoric – all of these things are generally connected with things of the Earth. Things that are of the created world.

Yet this is not what real joy is. Real joy is always blended with sorrow; and the things of the world which we feel joyful about, never work that way. This means that in general, we misunderstand both the word and the feeling that it’s meant to describe. Joy in its pure sense is a religious experience entirely unattached to the world.