Third Sunday of Advent: Joy

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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:




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