Posts Tagged ‘joy|quest-magazine-2012-07’

I took a book to read for work and a book for pleasure. I didn’t touch either of them. I didn’t do anything. Well, I smiled a lot.

When I started my training for spiritual direction, I figured that it would involve a lot of reading the classics of spirituality all those Desert Fathers and Mothers and Saints and a lot of sitting still, contemplating God’s emptiness or something.

The Great Surmise says simply this: At the heart of all creation lies a good intent, a purposeful goodness, from which we come, by which we live our fullest, to which we shall at last return. And this is the supreme reality of our lives.

I saw a meadowlark today, sitting atop the razor wire on the north fence. It’s been many months since meadowlarks were here last. Many months.

There’s just no accounting for happiness,or the way it runs up like a prodigalwho comes back to the dust at your feethaving squandered a fortune far away.

I’m not saying that joy hasn’t been part of many other things I’ve reflected about—celebration, sexuality, justice, love, grief—it’s just that I have never taken the time to reflect specifically and explicitly on joy.

From blossoms comesthis brown paper bag of peacheswe bought from the boy at the bend in the road where we turned towardsigns painted Peaches.