A Different Joy
“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.” ― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "The Heart of Matter"
The third Sunday of Advent is known as Gaudete Sunday—from the Latin for “rejoice.” The church sets aside the usual purple vestments, using rose as a sign that something long-awaited is near.
Joy in this setting is not the same as happiness. Etymologically, this distinction is notable: Happiness stems from the Old Norse hap (chance or fortune), implying a contingent state—a result of things happening to us. Joy, conversely, derives from the Latin gaudium, suggesting an intrinsic, inward state independent of external fortune.
This aligns with the scholarly understanding that Joy is ontological, not merely phenomenological; that is, it is a state of being rather than simply an emotion. Because Joy is a bedrock reality, our job isn’t to pursue it. Our role is one of receptive attention and openness, allowing Joy to disclose itself. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a chance occurrence of vast proportions. When did we ever remember?
To invite this deeper Joy, take a few minutes each day to practice deliberate, non-judgmental awareness of your immediate surroundings. Quiet attention, simply receiving the present moment, makes space for Joy to emerge. (The Hebrew root of “salvation” means space—the removal of constriction, which also informs the New Testament understanding of salvation as restoration and wholeness.)
Joy is a recognition, not a discovery, operating on the principle that “Joy finds us, we don’t find Joy.” Think of it this way: You don’t find the sun; you stand where the sun shines upon you. Joy is that given reality, like the sunlight, we must simply be open to receiving.
This deep, independent Joy provides a powerful lens for Advent. The Jesuit thinker Teilhard de Chardin approached the season through hope grounded in his understanding of the cosmos. He saw the story of Christ not merely as a birth in Bethlehem but as a pointer to the future of all creation. In his view, the universe moves toward a state in which matter and spirit meet in complete unity, and randomness makes sense.
Joy points toward this future. It withstands disillusion and despair because it looks ahead. Teilhard called this future the Omega Point, the moment creation reaches its fulfillment in Christ.
Happiness, by contrast, grows out of our own efforts. It rests on our immediate conditions.
Joy works in another way. It is a signal from within the world—a disclosure or grace that finds us because it is already a settled reality. It tells us that we are moving in step with a deeper movement toward unity. Joy can break into any moment; happiness tends to follow our plans.
This posture of openness matters when we cross cultures. When I moved abroad, I felt divided. Joy and difference have this in common: both ask us to loosen our grip and allow ourselves to be changed through encounter—to adopt the receptive stance required for Joy to unveil itself.
We all live in tension between different “cultures.” Crossing between them calls for a new emotional language. If we speak only our own, we cannot understand the experience of another.
Teilhard’s idea of Love enters here. He understood Love as the force that draws the universe toward unity, not uniformity. To love in this sense is a call for individual growth, where we learn to see another as a whole person. From this movement comes Convergence, where human thought and life converge into a shared field—the “noösphere” (from the Greek noos, meaning “mind” or “reason”).
Such movement requires tension. The inner work of living between worlds produces the friction through which we grow into our own personhood by entering relation with the whole.
Joy and culture both call for openness. Advent invites us to wait for what lies beyond our own reach. Life between cultures asks for the same posture.
When I lived abroad, I did not long for home; I found it in another place. Philip Larkin once wrote:
Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,
Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,
Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:
Once that was recognized, we were in touch. . .
I believe a line from the Christmas story carries a similar insight: The Wise Men, warned in a dream not to return to Herod, “went home by another way.” They reached the same place, but something in them had changed; they returned to where they began and saw it with new eyes.
T. S. Eliot put it in his own way:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
This is also Teilhard’s vision. Through Joy's ongoing work and the tensions and convergences that arise from it, we return to the beginning with new understanding. We see what was there—what is here—all along.
Notes and reading
The Hebrew root of “salvation…”—Contrary to the common English implication of rescue or avoiding punishment, the core Hebrew root (yāšaʿ) literally means to make wide or expand, denoting spaciousness and relief. This etymology suggests salvation is the removal of constriction and the expansion of life, aligning it with the New Testament idea of restoration and wholeness.
—John L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible (1965), 760. Fr. McKenzie was a pioneering and outspoken Roman Catholic biblical scholar.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter, trans. René Hague (2002). Teilhard—renowned French Jesuit theologian, mystic, and scientist—helped bring Christian theology into creative dialogue with modern science.
Ursula King, Christ in All Things (2016). King is a German theologian and scholar of religion who specializes in gender and religion, feminist theology, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Dominique Moisi, The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope Are Reshaping the World (2009). Moisi is a French political scientist and writer, Research Professor at King’s College, London.
Philip Larkin, “The Importance of Elsewhere,” The Whitsun Weddings (1955). Larkin was a poet, novelist, and librarian. He remains one of Britain’s most popular poets. The Centennial of his birth was celebrated in 2022.
T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” V, Four Quartets (1943, 2023)—Eliot’s masterpiece: a language for longing and return.
Rev. Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ (2018). Drawing on Scripture, patristics, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and modern theology, Rutledge is scholarly without being obscure for non-academics.
http://beezone.com/baptism-of-immortal-happiness
http://beezone.com/adida/bodily-location-of-happiness/lesson_of_life.html
http://www.adidam.org/content/teaching/print-files/sex-laughter-god-realization.pdf
A quote from a book for Children and everyone else too titled:
What,Where,When,How,Why, and WHO To Remember To Be Happy.
"Happiness is the now-and-forever Mystery that IS the Real Heart and the Only Real God of every one.
I am the Bright Teacher of Happiness - the Ruchira Avatar Adi Da Samraj, the Divine Heart-Master of all and All"
Matter is of course a modification of Indivisible Conscious Light
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds15.html
Sometimes I come to a familiar place in a city from an unfamiliar direction. When I do, the familiar surroundings of the familiar place sometimes look unfamiliar. And when I finally see the familiar place, I don't discover it so much as I recognize it: I don't experience happiness so much as I do joy. I like your reflection on the Magi's decision to go home another way after encounters with Herod and Jesus and the experience of their disorienting dream. I had never seen the verse in anything like this light: perhaps home indeed had changed for them.