From Joy to Joy to Joy

If I have a day of petty and not so petty problems, set-backs, and annoyances, and a chance to tell them all to my friend Emily (who preached here at our installation service in October), Emily listens with great empathy. And then she says, “I’m sorry some days are like that. Even in Australia.”

You may recognize that tag as the final line of the classic children’s book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. That book tells the story of a day in the life of a child named Alexander during which everything goes wrong: from waking up with gum in his hair to falling in the mud to the shoes he wants not being available in his size to lima beans for dinner and kissing on TV. In response to these and other terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things, Alexander says repeatedly, “I think I’ll move to Australia.” Until at the end of the story, at bedtime, his mother says to him, “Some days are like that. Even in Australia.”

That book was first published in 1972. Here, now in 2025, pretty much everyone in our country, except the 1%, would probably declare just about every single day “a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day.” I’ll talk about Practicing Joy in the context of this specific moment in history next week–and maybe then I’ll read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad. Today, I wanted a story of unadulterated joy. Today, if we can, for just the next ten or twelve minutes, I want us to drop the whole ‘end-of-US-civilization-as-we-know-it’ reality out of our conscious mind.

In its place, I want us to call to mind our normal lives, whatever that may be for each of us. Perhaps sometime between the end of the pandemic lockdown and the reelection of the current administration last fall. Or maybe a week before March 2020, the last time our whole world changed. Or maybe even last week, if we can focus our mind on the parts of it not consumed by executive orders and DOGE activities, tariffs and massive reductions in the federal workforce.

When you have a typical week in mind, notice how many days in it you might have considered a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Days when the coffee maker shorted out and you had to circle twice as long as usual looking for parking anywhere near the church and your kid/partner/pet made unreasonable demands on your time and mobile banking was glitchy and the gnats were ferocious and you couldn’t for the life of you figure out how to use the digital coupon to get the sale price on produce at Kroger.

Got a rough number of days?

In that same typical week, how many days did you move from joy to joy to joy? Days when the barista remembered your usual and an old friend reconnected and a baby smiled at you in the frozen foods aisle and the dog/cat/child/grandchild settled in for a good long cuddle and the first local tomatoes or berries or cucumbers showed up at the market and the music on WRUU was just what your soul has been craving.

OK. Now, was there any overlap? Any days when all the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things happened, and joy after joy after joy happened, too? If there were days like that, do you have a sense, if I hadn’t prompted you first to call to mind the no good days, which way you would have labeled those days that were a mix of terrible, horrible and joy to joy to joy? That is, on balance, do the spots of joy shimmer more brightly and prominently in your days and weeks than the very bad spots blare and buzz and flicker like faulty neon? Or is it the other way around for you?

Probably some days we’re more receptive to the joy dropping into our minutes and hours, and other days we’re more receptive to all the no good, very bad things that show up. It is probably also true, at least to a certain extent, that most of us have been trained by our upbringing or by our making sense of the world as we’ve experienced it over the years, to either expect joy, delight, wonder or to expect bad luck, mishaps, unfairness. And if we’ve been trained by others or ourselves, any one of us, to expect and therefore find back luck, mishaps, unfairness and other terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things, then we can, with deliberation and over time, train ourselves to expect and therefore discover joy, delight and wonder.

It may seem like joy should just burst forth spontaneously from our heart, not something we have to practice feeling or train ourselves to notice. But it’s not either one or the other. Like so much about being human, experiencing joy is both something that sometimes catches us by surprise and something we can practice opening ourselves to.

If you find that noticing the no good crowds out or swamps your awareness of joy, delight and wonder, and you’d like to shift the place, one way to begin is by recruiting a friend to coach you or partner you. You can ask them to remind you “some days are liike that. Even in Australia,” when you seem to be laser focused on all things that make a day or a week or your life feel terrible and horrible. The “some days” part can jolt you out of fooling yourself into believing all days are very bad days. And the “even in Australia” part can challenge your belief that you alone as especially cursed or singled out, or your belief that it is possible to escape such days altogether by making a drastic move–geographically or vocationally or relationally.

This isn’t a task you can assign to just any friend. It has to be a friend discerning enough to know when this humor-tinged empathy is called for and when a more nuanced, tell-me-more, empathy is called for. It can’t be someone who would fail to recognize or dismiss signs that you’re really struggling. If you don’t have such a friend, a spiritual director or therapist can also help you learn to shift your perspective, without denying the genuinely hard parts of your life. A mental health professional is absolutely the person you should seek out without hesitation if most or all of your days are horrible without any glimmer of joy of hope

There is a second task that more of our friends or family members might be suited for–playing the role of the summoner. Knocking on our door, demanding that we go see “clouds/…doing something to the moon/They never did before.” Making sure we noticed that five very different people commented on the great slogan on our t-shirt. Exclaiming over the sublime peach they’ve just bitten into and offering you a bite. Suggesting moonlight kite flying. You and a friend or sibling or other family member could be mutual summoners–making a pact to notice and call attention to sources of joy together and for one another. Such a practice will shift the balance toward living from joy to joy to joy for both of you.

Now, our joy can’t be someone else’s job forever, so these friends–the “even in Australia” friend and the summoner–have to be like training wheels, until we have practiced joy enough to notice it on our own, until we begin telling ourselves “some days are like that. Even in Australia.” Then they can shift from being training wheels to being booster shots to keep our practice in optimum health.

Life is often very hard, even in the best of times: confusing, disappointing, heartbreaking, challenging. Joy makes being human worth the struggle and simultaneously equips and bolsters us for that struggle. And, alongside friends, family members, spiritual directors and therapists, church invites us into the practice of living life from joy to joy to joy. Covenant group discussions and the community of the group itself build joy resilience and are often sources of joy in and of themselves. Giving to others, our community, and to our planet through social justice and ARC and the Green Team–though grounded in desire to respond and remedy so much that it is no good and very bad–paradoxically helps us fine tune our attention to delight and wonder. Singing in the choir, volunteering in RE, providing hospitality, watering the garden outside Rahn Hall–all of these are ways we summon ourselves into the presence and practice of joy. And in the seasons of our lives when it is all we can do to show up for church on Sunday mornings on YouTube Live or in the sanctuary, there is joy in the light through the colored panes, in the music, in the faces of beloveds, the sight of symbols of the world’s religions gathered into a single window, in the stillness, and the rustling of children as they settle in for a story. The hour moves from joy to joy to joy–though each of us will be moved to joy by different elements.

However you learn to cultivate it, and wherever you most discover it– here at church or out on the water or in your neighborhood or around your dinner table–may the days be many in your life when you live

"from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom."