There is a thing I believe with my whole entire being, and I have believed it quietly for years because I wasn’t sure how to say it without sounding like I’d been dipping into the communion wine.
Here it is: Human joy is one of the most divine forces in the universe.
Not metaphorically. Not as a motivational poster slogan. Not in the way that a pastor once told me everything good “points us back to God” while simultaneously explaining why my happiness was actually a sin.
No. I mean it. When a human being — a creature made of calcium, water, and confusion and childhood wounds and questionable decisions about credit cards — erupts into genuine, unguarded, unperformed joy, something sacred is happening.
I’m willing to die on this hill. I’ve brought snacks.
Think about what it actually takes to feel real joy. Not contentment. Not relief. Not the mild satisfaction of finding twenty dollars in a coat you forgot about. Joy. The kind that bubbles up from somewhere below your ribcage and you can’t quite explain why, except that something is right and you know it.
That kind of joy doesn’t come easy. It punches through circumstances. It ignores the to-do list. It shows up uninvited at business meetings and ruins your mascara at the most inappropriate moments.
It is, if you’ll permit me to get a little woo about it, stubborn. Almost aggressive. Like it knows something you don’t.
Which — and here’s where I put on my theological thinking hat — maybe it does.
I spent three decades being taught, in various creative ways, that joy was suspect.
Joy for joy’s sake? Selfish.
Joy that didn’t come wrapped in suffering and gratitude for said suffering? Spiritually shallow.
Joy that had anything to do with who I actually was? Absolutely not. That kind of joy was a trap.
I was handed a version of faith that treated human happiness as a distraction from holiness. A detour. A sign that you’d taken your eyes off the ball. The ball being, presumably, a God who really needed me to be miserable as proof that I was taking this seriously.
Bless their hearts. And also, no.
What they accidentally taught me — what took years of unlearning to understand — is that I had been handed a fundamentally diminished picture of the divine. A small God. A suspicious God. A God who looked at a human being doubled over in genuine, full-body laughter and thought, that one’s getting too comfortable.
I don’t believe in that God anymore.
Here’s what I believe instead:
If there is something sacred animating this whole wild cosmos — and I think there is, I just refuse to put it in a box or give it a voter registration card — then human joy is one of its fingerprints.
What does joy actually do? It connects us to each other. It dissolves pretense. It makes us briefly, beautifully honest. When we are genuinely delighted, when we feel genuinely alive, all the performance falls away. We’re just here. Present. Unguarded.
And if you believe — as I do — that what’s most true and most good in us is somehow continuous with what’s most true and most good in the universe, then our joy isn’t pulling us away from something holy.
It is something holy.
I want to be careful here, because I’m not talking about the performative happiness industrial complex. The toxic positivity crowd. The people who respond to legitimate suffering with “but have you tried gratitude journaling?” while making aggressive eye contact.
Real joy coexists with grief. It doesn’t erase the hard parts — it shows up alongside them and insists that life is still worth showing up for. It holds complexity the way a good hymn holds a complicated chord.
My husband Dan makes me laugh so hard sometimes that I have to hold onto the kitchen counter for structural support. My dog Gigi has a look she gives me — pure, uncomplicated delight at my existence — that is, I am convinced, closer to divine revelation than anything I’ve experienced in a pew.
Small things? Maybe. But I’ve stopped apologizing for the size of my joy.
Your joy is not frivolous. It is not a reward you haven’t earned yet. It is not something you should keep turning down to room temperature because the world is suffering and you shouldn’t take up too much space.
The world is suffering and you are allowed to be delighted.
The world is heavy and you are allowed to be light.
Joy is not an escape from life. It is evidence that life is still in there, still insisting, still refusing to be fully extinguished by whatever has tried to put it out.
And whatever is divine in this universe is not annoyed by your laughter.
I think it’s the source of it.
What’s something small that’s brought you genuine joy recently — the kind that sneaked up on you? Drop it in the comments.
And if joy feels very far away right now — it has a way of finding us when we’ve stopped looking. It’s stubborn like that.
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