Radical Joy

My grandfather farmed tobacco for decades in rich, terra cotta- colored soil 20 miles outside Winston Salem, North Carolina. A summer evening when I was a child, while visiting my grandparents, one of their barns caught fire and burned to ashes.  I was mesmerized by the brilliant blaze reaching high into the black night. A neighbor from down the dirt road commented on the intensity of the heat. “Hell must be even hotter than this,” I remember him saying.

John the Baptizer proclaimed,* “After me, one will come who will baptize us with the Holy Spirit and fire. With his winnowing fork, he will clear his threshing floor, gathering wheat into the barn and burning the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

I’ve come to experience “unquenchable fire,” not as punishment, but as grace. Daily I gently place the patterns, programs, habits and hurts of my life on this bonfire of grace. Daily I bless and release onto that bonfire the powerful emotions that arise in my awareness as messengers from within and beyond. Like an archeological dig, earlier layers keep emerging.

 In our Recovery Café communities, we refer to the powerful emotions that rob us of joy as “the big 5.”  The big 5 that can choke us are unrighteous anger, fear, shame, blame and self-loathing.  Of course, there are others.  We bless these patterns and emotions that arise because what we oppose we lock in, individually and collectively.  Blessing and releasing into the light of Divine Love all that arises over time transmutes it.   

We all need a trusted circle where we are deeply known and loved—where we are rigorously honest and vulnerable— that supports our blessing and releasing practice.  Some have a daily practice of blessing and releasing with a trusted friend via phone or text.  In short, our journey to joy is not a solo journey; and deep joy is available to us whatever the circumstances of our life, our nation and our world.

A close friend carried for decades the shame of “not being enough; not being smart enough, good enough, kind enough, accomplished enough.”  She recalled as a girl, accidentally leaving a bag of smoldering coals on the wooden floor just beyond the brick fireplace.  For over fifty years she carried shame for “almost burning the house down.” She carried the heavy message, “had you been enough, you would have known better.”  Blessing and releasing that shame has cleared space in her for the radical joy that is her birthright. 

 Another friend shared that two individuals knocked on his door one Saturday morning to warn him of hellfire. This friend joked, “I might have been convinced if they had not been so joyless.”