Happy Face 13

Joy is the golden thread that runs through and beautifies the darker, more somber colours of the fabric. "Laughter runs against my pain, slips away then comes again", as the Christian song goes. It is more than wearing a happy face. It is that the joy is there underneath and through it all. This is decidedly different from the jangling and irritating laughter of the self-centred happy idiot, whose narcissism seems to know no bounds. It is a quality and depth of joy that develops through experience, through a long life of getting one's ass almost constantly kicked, then accepting the lesson and moving on and forward and hopefully upward. A friend and I were once having a conversation about prayer versus mindfulness. It was stated by my friend that prayer is useless because he doesn't believe that God exists, and that mindful meditation is the way to get better, to heal and bind up our wounds and to make us feel good about ourselves. My friend appears to know very little about prayer, nor the vast range of spiritual experience that comes through prayer. I have over the years been practicing, without so much as knowing it, a kind of centring or mindful prayer. This has nothing to do with emulating a Buddhist practice and every bit to do with going deep into God, usually when I am walking in quiet places. This first began for me when i was twenty-three or so. I would find myself walking in quiet places with the developing awareness that the deity I called God, was and is actually present, constantly present, perpetually present, all around us, inside us and that his presence is the very energy and dynamic that holds in their orbit all the subatomic particles that make up matter and all existence. I cannot say what brought me to that awareness, though I believe that it was the Holy Spirit. I soon found myself going into the silence, finding great reserves of peace and renewal. This seemed more a natural and organic process, than something externally directed. I was basically longing with love for closer contact with the Divine and the Divine was answering my petition. I do feel that there were certain conditions in place in my life at that time to facilitate this dynamic. i was poor, financially, but also felt a certain poverty of spirit. I felt empty, alone and in great need. I had at that time been enacting a kind of dynamic of repentance. This was not about hating or loathing myself, nor being full of regret over sins real or imagined. This was more an act of joyously abandoning myself to God, turning to him with my entire being, wanting to keep nothing for myself but to gladly and willingly surrender everything to him, who is the source and fount of all being and existence. I was simply offering back to God that which already is God's by right. this act of love and humility put in motion a living dynamic, a kind of dynamo effect that goes on to this very day. I think this is also for me the departure point between mindfulness and prayer. Not simply feeling centred, not merely feeling good about myself, not merely enjoying myself, there has been also an interior thrust propelling me towards caring more for others, for the world, a greater desire to share myself and what I have with others, a greater move towards seeing all people as my friends and family, and not simply a chosen few. This also creates some real awkwardness, given that we are living in a world that does not acknowledge God, that is without love, full of selfishness, conflict and loneliness, and populated with billions of needy losers who all think they are the centre of the universe. And this is the hardest thing to reckon with. I'm not sure if we are ever fully cured of that nonsense that seems to cling to us from the terrible twos till when we are old and weak and drawing our last sputtering breath. love is when we leave the centre of the universe, and this love brings us joy. This doesn't free us from sadness or suffering, for that is also part of life, but the golden thread of joy underneath can redeem and beautify the sorrow and ugliness, transforming our lives into something beautiful for God.