Make a Joyful Noise

Interfaith Celebration Gathering

Make a Joyful Noise

If you are like most of us, you celebrate your birthday, Thanksgiving, and one or more other religious or nationally recognized holidays? Most folks celebrate nationally recognized holidays only if they get a day off from work. Otherwise, the national holidays pass without recognition. As for religious holidays, only the devout celebrate the true meaning and intent of the holidays.

It seems that we humans require not only time off from work but we also require permission to celebrate. And we only celebrate when it is formally accepted as proper to do. This difficulty with celebration goes back to our Puritanical ancestors (they get blamed for a lot, don’t they?). The Puritans were not big on celebration or joy.

Smiling, laughing out loud, dancing, and other expressions of joy often led to being labeled a witch in Puritanical times, and persons suspected of being witches were not treated kindly. Some were burned at the stake. Others were placed on a chair suspended over water and then lowered quickly into water to see if they floated. If they freed themselves from where they were bound to the chair, and floated to the top for air, they were said to definitely be witches, and they were burned or hanged or tortured. If they could not escape from the chair to which they were tied and drowned, it was determined they were not witches. This was definitely a lose-lose situation.

So, as a society, we have many prohibitions against celebration and joy built into our lives. Proper behavior for an adult does not allow one to simply twirl around and laugh out loud simply for the joy of it. Nor do we find adults skipping along down the sidewalk, playing Hide and Seek in corporate corridors, blowing bubbles in board meetings, or adorning the walls of their offices with their own crayon drawings. And, contrary to the story line of the musicals of yesteryear, groups of people do not spontaneously burst into song in the elevator and while walking down the street.

Too bad this is not the norm. Life would be a whole lot more fun if we allowed the joy inside us to bubble up to the top of our behavior so that we celebrated life, the miracles in it, and our joy in living each and every day. A recent study reported that people who sing along with the radio as they are driving have fewer traffic accidents. Had researchers bothered to measure it, they likely would have found that these people also feel more joy.

Joy is one of the many emotions our Creator gave us, but it is probably the least used of our range of emotions that includes anger, frustration, sadness, shame, fear, love, and happiness. Joy is a feeling of connection with the universe, a recognition of the many miracles in our lives, and a deep appreciation for all of them. When we are joyous, we feel like celebrating. We want to enfold everyone and everything into our joy, spreading it all over everyone around us. We want to spin around, sing out loud, turn cartwheels, and hug ourselves.

But, being the fine, upstanding descendants of Puritans that we are, we seldom allow ourselves to experience joy to its fullest extent. We confine our celebrations to our birthdays, national and religious holidays. We suppress our joy.

But when we suppress our joy, we miss out on so much. We fail to see the miracles in each and every day. We remain proper, doing proper things, being proper employees, parents, employers, or whatever other roles we play in life. We miss out on the joyous interactions with others in which we touch each other’s souls. We also do not get to experience the most profoundly deep connection with God that we can ever experience, for that is where joy takes us.

We need to be more childlike. We need to be silly. For it is in the letting go of roles and rules that we can truly experience joy in our lives. When the prophets of old told us to “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord” they knew whereof they spoke. For it is in the experiencing of joyousness that we also experience God’s love in its fullest measure. When we let down our guard so that we can be joyful, God’s love washes over us, healing and enveloping us.

May God add a blessing to these humble words.

AMEN