Pagan Values Month Blogpost 2: Joy!
A lot of people who know me might be surprised to find that the pagan value I choose to discuss first is not love. But love is a function of my faith and a complex part of my relationship with myself, and I choose to begin with more of a root value. What led me to paganism, and what keeps me here more than anything else, is joy.
Joy is one of the deepest foundations of my practice. My early teachings left me with the belief that the best way to demonstrate your faith to others was to be profoundly and sincerely happy in it, openly. Even after I left Christianity, that persisted. When I began my path of seeking, the feeling I was looking for was that feeling of deep, joyful rightness, a profound happiness in what I was doing. I had been missing it, because the faith I’d been practicing didn’t resonate; there were too many conflicts and trappings surrounding the basic relationship with divinity.
As I have found it, that joy continues to be a fundamental value of my practice and my faith. I seek it in all that I do, because celebrating life as a constant conscious act of joy is sacred.
Finding joy as an act of worship seems almost silly on the face of it, like it’s a triviality. Many people believe that faith should make you a better person, a more honest or kind or moral person. That it should give you a clear blueprint of right and wrong, and then give you tools to erase or overcome those parts of yourself it tells you are ‘bad’. That, to me, is the difference between faith and religion. Religion gives you all of those things, tells you how to be and when and where and what to do. Faith, though, faith is the thing that makes you *happy* when you follow it. It doesn’t tell you what’s bad; it encourages you to embrace the whole of yourself as a loved, worthy being. And that embrace of the whole, that full understanding of self, is a celebration that shines out from you to the world around you, creating connection and understanding, extending your personal sacred space to include everywhere you walk your path.
When I sit alone before my altar, I renew the source of my joy: a deep and loving relationship with my goddess. I seek to hold to my commitments, to honor my promises, and she honors her commitments to me. I take that joy out with me into my life, letting it flow out to fill the spaces around me. As I stand in circle with my loved ones, we share our love and our joy, and in sharing we multiply it. When that circle is opened, the joy we have created between ourselves is released to change the world.
Sometimes, the magics we work are not happy ones. It can be very hard to reconcile a joyful heart with the loss of a friend or with fears for the future. Those are the real challenges of faith. Finding the joy in a dark moment is one of the hardest things for me to face, as a priestess and as an individual, and once found trying to *express* that joy can be a source of misunderstanding and conflict. Much of what we say to one another to try and share the joy we find in a dark moment has been reduced to platitudes of “He’s in a better place now,” or “We were so blessed to know her.” We are conditioned to consider, “Yes, this is a terrible tragedy and I have deep compassion for your sorrow, but it serves to remind us that life is a flashing, beautiful, brief process of change, to pull us out of our petty momentary cares and show us that someday our lives too will be honored and remembered by those we’ve touched, to give us reasons to draw closer together in empathy and understanding, and I’m struck, here, by how profoundly lucky we are to have this moment of mortal pain and shared comfort,” as a remarkably insensitive truth to speak to a grieving loved one, so more often we keep the joy of dark moments to ourselves and acknowledge them privately or at a distance.
I do believe that someday we will see joy as fundamental and necessary enough that we will never feel embarrassed or stifled in an expression of joy, that those who strive to find and share the beauty in every situation will not be considered heartless or thoughtless, but I think that day is not one likely to come in my lifetime, so I will continue to struggle with my own balance of joy and sensitivity
I love you all.