Pastoral Letter: What if God is Joy?

May 3, 2023

Dear Sisters and Brothers -

United Methodist minister and author Steve Garnaas-Holmes recently published a poem on joy that I think is important to share. It is a series of questions, each inviting the reader to pause, look deep within and ask, “Is this my experience of God?” “Do I believe this?” “What if this were the case?”

I hope you take time with this piece, reading through it slowly, spending time with the question(s) that strike your heart most deeply, perhaps even over the course of some days, allowing yourself to feel their intuitive truth, allowing them to infuse the way you imagine and experience God.

Oremus pro invicem.

Fr. Greg

What if God is Joy?
by Steve Garnaas-Holmes

What if God is joy?
What if the Father is bliss and the Son is gratitude
and the Holy Spirit is gleeful wonder?
What if creating is God’s play,
and the big bang was an outburst of happiness
and the galaxies are spun from pure delight?
What if gravity, that holds the universe together,
is simply the pleasure of harmony,
and every created thing’s ecstatic desire for one another?
What if earth is God’s great celebration,
spinning and dancing and making music and beauty
and inviting everyone in to feast and wonder?
What if being itself is such a miracle
that God gets endless enjoyment out of it?
What if God doesn’t own a throne (most
uncomfortable)
and has never handled a gavel,
but has a million musical instruments?
What if God goes to hell every weekend
with a load of tissues and listens to everybody
who’s locked themselves up in there
until they’ve cried out all their sorrows,
and they come out laughing and dancing?
What if what it means to come to God
is to enter into God’s joy?
What if the work of justice
is to enable everyone to truly know joy?
(And would that not mean that cruelty and injustice
are most heinously sinful?)
What if even in our grief and our despair
the root of our being is joy,
and resurrection means passing through our sorrow
into God’s delight?
What if salvation means
being rescued from our inability to rejoice?
Why not? Why not? Do you think you can convince me
that God is all somber and serious?
What if even now, as you consider this,
and think it’s kind of silly,
God is laughing… and waiting?