"The Who and What"

When you turn to the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of John and go down to the relevant verse you’ll encounter, “These things I have spoken unto you, that my JOY might remain in you, and that your JOY might be full.”

There you have it! A one-sentence peek into the cosmic rationale that inspired Him to walk the dusty byways of ancient Judea delighting minds and enchanting hearts with a teaching that was so pure and so inspired it’s still haunting us this Carolina summertime, nagging at us to wake up; take a deep breath, smell the roses and EN-JOY the grace.

Can you hear Him telling us that the name of His game is JOY? He’s letting us know that His bottom line boils down to refining the spiritual art of toasting the whimsical, applauding the absurd, loving the ludicrous, adoring the arrogant, embracing the enigmatic, welcoming the witless, and perfecting playfulness as primary response to the ever-changing flow of form and circumstance we call our lives.

And what better time on earth could there possibly be to work on our capacity to express light-hearted levity as our basic nature than NOW! Are we blessed, or what?!

So, what’s preventing us from feasting on a steady diet of chuckles as basic emotional nutrition?

As I consider the question one thing becomes eminently apparent. Unless I expand my inquiry to include the “who” that’s doing the “what” that stands between me and a light-hearted relationship with the “Now,” the answer will remain a mystery. Failing to consider the question of “who” it is that’s doing “what” will surely leave me lost in the fantasy that there’s an “it” out there somewhere that I can blame for turning my joy into a rock and a hard place.

Regarding the identity of the “who” that’s truly the culprit, Walt Kelly said it best when he had Pogo observe, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

And there we have it. Try as we may to shift blame and disown responsibility for our emotional downtime, the truth lies clear and undisguised . . . each one of us is individually responsible for the thoughts we think and agree with, and the feelings those perceptions give birth to.

If we are thinking and agreeing with thoughts that are spiritually uninformed, (the “what” part of this equation) it’s straight to an emotional jail of one kind or another. And, as Jesus advised in Matthew 5:26, we’ll stay in lock-down ”till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing,” which is Aramaic for, “until you’ve milked the drama dry.”

On the other hand, if your perception of ongoing reality is based on thoughts that are spiritually informed, it’s “zippity-do-dah” and welcome to the “Joy” of the Lord!

So, the dance we are doing is the cosmic exercise of learning to talk to ourselves about our life and times using mental constructs that are chaste and free of any hint of “bearing false witness.”

And how, exactly, do we “bear false witness?” Oh my, let me count the ways. Any time we find ourselves describing an experience using thinking patterns that are spiritually uninformed, it is absolutely inevitable that we’ll come away with a perception of our life that will severely challenge our capacity to maintain contentment and joy as basic nature.

As we begin to carefully observe our mind at play, we’ll inevitably wake up to how different aspects of our life influence it. We’ll become familiar with its different patterns of thought processing. We’ll notice the kinds of thinking that lead to more suffering, more pain, to greater tightness and contraction. And, we’ll begin to choose not to invest agreement in any thinking that perpetuates suffering.

Conversely, we’ll discover the patterns of thinking that lead to more spaciousness and openness, to a free, easy, and joyful relationship with both ourselves and other people in our lives. And in that discovery we’ll find that the key to making our joy “full” is to “watch our minds like they were rattlesnakes” and drink deeply of the Truth that sets us free.

Enjoy the Grace!
--Chad

© 2005 Rev. Chad O'Shea

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