One of the rewards of the life of faith is joy. It is one of the fruits of the spirit.

While joy is a gift from God, we need to claim it. We claim it by cultivating it. We need to participate in the life of the spirit in order to receive it.

There may be many paths to joy, but I want to address one of them. It is a contemplative perspective, an amalgam of my reading of the Bible, Quaker faith, and personal experience.

The road to joy starts in silence. The prophet Elijah teaches that we are more likely to encounter God in silence than cataclysmic events (like tornadoes, earthquakes, or infernos; 1 Kings 19.12). The tremendous and fascinating mystery to be found at the heart of reality is readily available to us, but it is hidden. Due to its hiddenness, we need to make ourselves small to find it. When we become smaller, God has room to show up in our awareness.

To make ourselves smaller, we need to cultivate silence. Outward quiet is a step in the right direction (e.g. being alone, unplugging, walking in nature, etc.), but the essential end is inward silence.

And all you that are in your own wisdom, and in your own reason, [I will] tell you of silent waiting upon God, that is famine to you; it is a strange life to you to come to be silent, you must come into a new world. Now thou must die in the silence, to the fleshly wisdom, knowledge, reason, and understanding; so thou comest to feel that which brings thee to wait upon God; …that brings thee to feel the power of an endless life, and come to possess it.

As George Fox (one of the founders of Quakerism) states in the quote above, inward silence can be like living without food–a painful experience due to the fact we have nothing that can feed our existential loneliness. While Fox warns us of the difficulty associated with silence, he also reassures us by implying that it is a way into a new world.

So, we sit in silence to become aware of, then release, the words that inhabit our consciousness. (I recommend the spiritual practice of Centering Prayer.) We separate ourselves from the plethora of ideas in our awareness (many of which we use to entertain or pacify ourselves) to create a space for the divine mystery to appear and to give ourselves up to it.

By sitting in silence, we harbor stillness. We hinder our voluntary movement, gross and fine, including the drifting of our mind. This stillness is not to deny our needs but to rekindle an awareness of the depths of our inward reality. We can feel the Holy Spirit rise in the crucible of our souls when we stop our native movement.

In stillness then, we find solitude. By being alone with ourselves, we find ourselves. We return to our true nature. We find who we are in our being.

Paradoxically, in being alone, in silence and stillness, we find we are not alone. We discover that God is with us. We have become small enough to allow God to rise into our awareness and still enough to perceive the movement of the Holy Spirit.

In solitude, we come to realize that Being is all around and through and within us. Love itself has pulled us up to itself; we experience communion with eternal being.

To find ourselves grounded in and filled by the eternal love of God, we find security. This is a profound blessing… to be secure within oneself, to know that ones most basic need has been satisfied, to know and be known in ones essential self, to realize that one is sharing in the divine life.

Then, we remember that all we did to find this blessedness was to stop the busyness. With this in mind, the staggering truth can become known. We learn and come to know that where we go, we go with God. And see that we always have… and always will.

When we know that we go with God, in all times and places, peace begins to grow in our personality. Our essential need for security has been met. We come and go with God!

We just didn’t know it before because we hadn’t allowed the Holy Spirit to rise in our awareness and move within our reality. Come what may, the God of Creation, the source of all things and all times, is within.

This is the peace that passes understanding. It’s uncanny. It’s unexpected. Wherever one looks, one sees beauty and truth. When we carry this peace, dismay is quickly rooted out again.

In this ground grows cheerfulness…. Everyone, everything we meet contains this reality. If the Spirit is in me, it is in all. No one, no thing is excluded. Whether it is closed or opened, the fountain is in place. The water may rise in different intensities and measures, but the Holy Spirit is there.

Everything now rises to join us and we are enabled to meet it in friendship. I believe this is what George Fox meant:

Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you.

Then joy comes in. Joy is our response to the experience of the ineffable in time, especially when one is convinced that they can never be separated from it. Even while inhabiting this imperfect world, where suffering and death seem to have the upper hand, where tyranny and exploitation seem to proliferate, God reigns. The being before time is present. Now, given our communion with the Creator, who is also the Sustainer and Transformer, we are equipped to continue creation, to bring the divine into time.

Communing with God in time fosters joy. And knowing that this joy dwells in each other makes our joy complete. May you know the presence of God within to bless you.

Quick recap.

The sequence from silence to joy:

Silence… Stillness… Solitude… Security… Peace… Cheerfulness… Joy!!!