“If thou art merry, praise the Lord with singing, with music, with dancing, and with a prayer of praise and thanksgiving. If thou art sorrowful, call on the Lord thy God with supplication, that your souls may be joyful.” (D&C 136: 28-29). We will often try to draw distinctions between joy and other “good” emotions like pleasure, happiness, gladness, and the like. We rarely, if ever, associate joy with “bad” emotions like pain, sorrow, and heartbreak. But if we read the two verses above together, then the Lord teaches us that being merry and being sorrowful are both integral, indispensable parts of being joyful. In Surprised By Joy, CS Lewis explains that Joy is “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction”; that it has in common with Happiness and Pleasure only “That anyone who has experienced it will want it again”; and that in its quality “it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.” The truth is that Joy is a part of and indistinguishable from Charity, the pure love of Christ. When Lehi partakes of the fruit of the Tree of Life, he says that if filled his soul with exceedingly great joy (1 Nephi 8:12) and later Nephi perceives that this fruit is the love of God (1 Nephi 11:22). When we are filled with the love of God, we are filled with Joy. This joy is the most desirable above all things and that desire directs us both to our Heavenly Father and our Savior Jesus Christ and to our family members. Joy is not so much a particular feeling as it is a connection between us and our Heavenly Father. The feelings that can arise from that connection, both positive and negative, are collateral effects of that connection. When we are merry and we want to praise the Lord with singing and music and dancing and prayers of gratitude, these are positive effects of our joyous connection with our Heavenly Father. When we are sorrowful and we reach out to the Lord with prayers of supplication, these are, or at least seem to us while we are going through them, negative effects of our joyous connection with our Heavenly Father. It has always puzzled me that the promise of the Plan of Happiness, in which we inherit all that our Heavenly Father has and become like Him and do as He does and specifically that we dwell with our Heavenly Father in endless joy, could be possible when it is clear that our Heavenly Father can and does experience great sorrow and heartache pretty much constantly while dealing with His lost and wayward children and experienced an infinite amount of anguish and suffering at the death of His Only Begotten Son. How is God living in “endless joy” when He feels so much sorrow? As Enoch said when witnessing God weep, “How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?” (Moses 7:29). Was God filled with joy when He was weeping thus? The answer is yes. As was Enoch experiencing joy when he “looked upon their wickedness, and their misery, and wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook.” (Moses 7:41). Joy represents the longing, yearning ache that draws our hearts and our minds and our souls to our Father in Heaven. When we are close to Him or at least drawing closer, then is our joy sweet and bright and glad. When we are far or else prevented from drawing any closer, then our longing may be bitter and dark and sorrowful. The important thing to remember is that whether we are lying down in green pastures or walking through the valley of the shadow of death, there need not be anything separating us from the love and the joy of the Lord. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, it was with joyful desire mingled with grief and painful hope that the father went day after day and watched a long way off for his son, just as it was with joyful desire mingled with gladness and hope requited that he killed the fatted calf and celebrated when his son returned. A soul is the body and spirit united, and joy is pain and pleasure, gladness and sorrow, light and darkness, sweetness and bitterness, having and wanting all united together. There is joy in gladness and there is gladness in joy. There is joy in grief and grief in joy. If we are merry and are moved by humility and wonder to praise our God with gratitude for all that He has blessed us with, then we will be filled with joy, not because we deserve it or because we expect our happiness to continue on unabated, but because we are filled with the love of God and thus are also filled with joy. If we are anguished and distressed and heartbroken and in humility and pain we cry out to our Heavenly Father in supplication and despair, then we will be filled with joy, not because our pain and heartbreak will magically be wiped away but because even as we drink from the bitter cup we are filled with the love of God and thus are also filled with joy. Joy is bigger than our pain and it is bigger than our pleasure. I know that the closer we are to our Heavenly Father, the more joy we will have in our lives, and the more we will be concerned with maintaining our relationship with Him and seeking to carry out His goal, then the less we will focus on trying to seize or hoard the glittering parts of joy or else to strip ourselves from the heavy and sorrowful parts of joy. We want to be like our Heavenly Father, and we will feel both pleasure and pain as we become more and more like Him and are filled with more and more joy, just as our Heavenly Father Himself is filled with the same intense desire for each of His children to become more like Him, and also feels both pain and pleasure as He watches us struggle to love Him as much as He loves us.
