Third Sunday of Advent: Joy

By -
My friend Sarah Doremus has recently started blogging again and has been doing a guest series of ways to "make Christmas merry." I have been enjoying this series and then I saw her post that her husband, my friend Lucas, wrote about the difference between happiness and joyfulness. This is something that has run across my mind from time to time but really crystalised while reading his thoughts.

Happiness is a good thing. Really, it is. Happiness has been the topic of books, movies, essays, and philosophical treatises for ages. (While not for all of the above, but folks have been discussing happiness for a really long time.) I like being happy. It makes me, well, happy!



So, what is happiness? To this I turn to one of my favourite resources: the Online Etymology Dictionary. According to this collection, the word "happiness" has been used to describe a "pleasant and contented mental state" since the 1590s. So then I decided to dig back further to see understand what "happy" is and how the word came about. Sometime around 1200 AD, English adopted the Old Norse word "happ" to describe chance or good luck. Attaching the simple -y suffix gave it the meaning of being characterised by luck or fortune or of events "turning out well." So, putting it all together and reading the meanings of the various roots and affixex, we understand that happiness is the quality of being characterised by good luck or fortune.

That's not a bad thing at all! But that does mean that happiness is dependent on events outside one's control. In other words, when things go well, I will be happy, but since I can't control the actions of others or of nature, I can't always guarantee that I will be happy.

So what of joy? Joy is, after all, the main focus of the third Sunday of Advent. What is joy? Much like happiness, joy is something that people have discussed for a very long time, perhaps for as long as humans have contemplated their existence. Joy is, returning to the etymology dictionary, a feeling of delight and is often a source of happiness. In this case, it can be surmised that if one is happy, then one is also joyful. But can one be joyful without happiness? Lucas said yes. I agree wholeheartedly.

How can we be joyful when we aren't happy? That is tied to one of the earlier topics I wrote about this Advent season: hope. It is hope that leads me to be filled with joy, even when times are dark, when it seems that nothing is going as I wish, when it seems, indeed, that everything is wrong. It is this hope that gives me joy in my Saviour. It is this joy that has helped me through the past several years. It is because of this joy that I do not despair. It is my hope in the promises made to me in scriptures and in sacred covenants that I have made with my Heavenly Father that I have joy in my life. I close today with this modern rendition of a classic:




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crafty Craftiness

By -
Image
So... um, so much for writing a new blog post once a week. I don't even remember how long it took for me to stop. I keep meaning to update, but then life happens and I don't get around to it. I probably have too many blogs that I try to keep up with in the first place. I update my teaching blog every day there is school. I update the million minutes blog a few times each month, and I thoroughly neglect the GreedCycle blog that Gretch and I started over a year ago. Anyway, Gretch and I have had a lot going on, but since we really don't  want our blog to be just medical updates, I haven't been writing about them. And since the day-to-day activities of our lives rarely seem to be "blog-worthy" (other than my teaching which, as already mentioned, is blogged about elsewhere), I end up not updating this blog as much as I probably should. Who knows, maybe I'll get back into the swing of things this year. New year, new chance to hold myself to a standard of u
Read more

And This Is Life Eternal

By -
Many of you know that I am a professional educator. I work in the Freeport School District as the Curriculum Coordinator for 21st Century Teaching and Learning. Whenever I have the opportunity to share this with others upon meeting them for the first time, one of the first questions I get is, “Is that your real hair?” Apparently, there are things people care about more than know what it means to coordinate the teaching and learning efforts of an entire century. (The answer, by the way, is yes, this is my real hair; no, I don’t dye it; yes, it really is this curly; and no, you cannot touch it to see if it is actually a wig.)  Once I am able to get the discussion about my amazing naturally curly hair out of the way, we get back to the question of what it is I actually do. My favourite way to describe my job is that I am a teacher of teachers and that my main responsibility is to get them to put away the worksheets and step away from the PowerPoint so that they can engage their student
Read more

Who Are You?

By -
A thought has been running through my mind this morning and it doesn't seem to be planning on leaving any time soon. I have things I need to get done (such as applying for more jobs for the coming school year), so I am hoping that this may help me at least share the thought well enough that I can worry about other things. The thought is really more of a question. Who am I? Who are you? How do I define myself? How do you define yourself? So often in our lives, we have opportunities to introduce ourselves to new people. I've mentioned before how I have this habit of introducing myself as Alex Valencic but, if I am writing my name, it is always Alex T. Valencic. After sharing my name, it is inevitable that someone will want to know more about me, and the first thing they ask is what I do. How we respond to this question says a lot about what we think of ourselves, I think. When someone asks me what I do, I respond by either saying I am a teacher or I am a professional educat
Read more