Essay
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Joy
10 min read

Dreaming a world

When we dream a life, we dream a world. One of love, peace and joy. Such flourishing is a life led well, going well and feeling as it should.
Marketer stall traders and customers reach out arms and hands to exchange fruit and money above piles of produce.
'It is in the context of this whole world at peace that the true value of material goods becomes clear.'
Renate Vanaga on Unsplash.

Dreams are rarely modest. They don’t stay neatly in the compartments we make for them. Let’s say you have a dream job. Well, if you dream of working as an engineer or a baker or a teacher, you are also dreaming of clients, ingredients, or students and a school. Or maybe you have a dream home. Well, that home can’t exist in a vacuum. It requires a neighborhood, various political communities, a natural environment, and countless other people.

When we dream a life, we dream a world.

When Jesus preached, he announced a transformed world. When Christians dream a world, his is the world we ought to hope for. Jesus called it the “kingdom of God,” which is just to say, the world as God would have it be. That, however, only gets us so far. What kind of world would God want, after all?

Almost two-thousand years ago, some Christians in Rome were having trouble agreeing about this. Trying to help them out, Paul, the travelling preacher wrote them a letter. In it, he offered a “definition” of this ‘kingdom of God’. The Roman Christians were in danger, he thought of placing too much weight on a minor question about what food they should or should not eat. In response, Paul advises them to permit various different eating practices in their community: “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink,” he says, “but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

A life worth dreaming, Paul is saying, is not merely about the means of life— what keeps us alive – things like food, drink, money, safety, health, and the like. Flourishing includes these things, but it orients them toward life led well (righteousness), life going well (peace), and life feeling as it should (joy).

If we look at each of these three things in turn, we can glimpse a compelling vision of what it means to flourish and what kind of world we might dream of (and live towards) today.

Life Led Well: Righteousness

Righteousness, to be honest, is a strange word. It has a rather musty aroma to it: overly formal and more than a little out of date. These days, we hear it most often in the context of self-righteousness, which is decidedly not part of leading one’s life well.

So what on earth does Paul mean by it? Paul was writing in ancient Greek, and the word he uses could also be translated as “justice.” It’s an important word in the Jewish scriptures that Paul read. It means something like being in step with God’s law, which had been laid out in God’s agreement, or covenant with God’s people. This covenantal relationship is, according to Paul, the context in which our lives flourish. To lead our lives well is to act in line with the good intentions of this covenantal relationship. This is what “righteousness” means for Paul.

We might do all sort of impressive things, even things that look like moral heroism, but if we do them without love... they’re deeply flawed.

When Jesus was asked how to sum up the law that defines righteousness, he answered: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. So a “righteous” life is a life of love. Whatever we might do, Paul says, if we do it apart from love, it lacks value. We might be a religious virtuoso with all sorts of nifty spiritual gifts, but if we lack love, we are “nothing.” We might do all sorts of impressive things, even things that look like moral heroism, but if we do them without love, Paul insists, they’re deeply flawed.

Some of the most famous words ever written about love give us an idea of what love looks like in practice:

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

This kind of love isn’t just any kind of love. It’s God’s kind of love. It’s the love that God has shown over and over again in faithful care for the world and in particular for God’s people. It’s the love, above all, that we see in the life of Jesus, who was willing to die for us as an expression of love.

God’s love is faithful even in the midst of the world’s brokenness. This fact offers a profound sense of assurance. God is for us. And “if God is for us,” Paul writes,

“who can be against us?” If God gave God’s own Son for us, what would God not give?

“Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

To be sure, the love of God does not guarantee that our lives will go well. Jesus faced misunderstanding and violent opposition. If we love like he did, we could face the same. In Jesus, the power and wisdom of God’s love looked like weakness and foolishness. Ours should too. In Jesus, the cost of love was death. We ought to be prepared for the same.

In a fully flourishing world, none of that would be the case. Love would not suffer but dance with joy. But our world is not yet fully flourishing. (Obviously.) Love, however, spans the gap between the world we have and the world we hope for because it’s how we should live on both sides of the divide. To love well is—always and everywhere—to lead one’s life well.

Life Going Well: Peace

Paul defines life going well as peace. Peace is primarily about right relationships, which are the most important of life’s circumstances. They’re the context in which the value of other circumstances (food, money, etc.) becomes clear. For Paul, life is going well when we live at peace with God, with one another, and with the whole creation.

The foundation of life going well is peace with God.  Against all the odds, God has made this peace for us, having “reconciled us to himself through Christ.” Ultimately, when Christ’s purpose is fully realized at the end of all things, the world will be filled with God’s presence and become the home of God, entirely at peace with its creator. This fundamental peace flows in and through all the relationships between creatures. We and the world come to be at home with one another when God is at home among us.

Captives should be set free. Needs should be met. Honor should be extended to those on the margins, in fact to everyone.

Paul thinks this kind of peace should start to show up here and now among those who have taken up Jesus’s way of life. In this community, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Unity in diversity and mutual belonging are foundational principles for the way of life Paul advocates. Captives should be set free. Needs should be met. Honor should be extended to those on the margins, in fact to everyone. This is how the Church is supposed to live. All too often, history shows us, it does not.

The good news is that Jesus’s peace is not trapped in or dependent on the church. Ultimately, it extends beyond the bounds of the human community entirely. Full human flourishing is bound together with the full flourishing of all humanity and the entirety of the creation.

It is in the context of this whole world at peace that the true value of material goods becomes clear. As part of a world loved by God and destined to be God’s home, the fruit of the creation and the products humans craft are valuable. And because they are valuable, it is important that they be equitably distributed. This is an essential component of true peace, one that is plainly lacking in our world today.

Because of the unjust distribution of material goods and the broken relationships it reveals, peace is not always possible, or even good. It would be wrong to live fully at peace with a wealth-obsessed vision of life or within an economic system where some starve while others waste nearly as much food as they consume. While we ought to pursue genuine peace, we ought to beware of false peace.

In this life, all is not at peace—and it will never be. Flourishing life in this world is lived for the sake of a peace that we will never find in its fullness this side of a renovation of creation that we cannot bring about for ourselves. Nevertheless, we should live as peacemakers. We should work to reconcile ruptured relationships among humans, between humans and God, and between humans and the rest of the natural world. We should also accept that we may be hated precisely because we are peacemakers. Sometimes leading our lives well results in our lives not going well.

Life Feeling as it Should: Joy

Paul offers us a vision of flourishing in which (1) a life led well is one of righteous love and (2) for life to go well is for there to be peace. How would it feel to live such a life? One word could never sum it up completely, but Paul’s best shorthand is joy.

Joy is an emotional response to something that we recognize as good. We don’t simply rejoice in the abstract; we rejoice over something that we take to be good. In the context of a fully flourishing life, joy is the “crown” of the good life: joy is the appropriate response of the righteous person in a world at peace.

Solidarity like this requires us to resist modern tendencies to weep over those who rejoice (Instagram’s FOMO) and rejoice over those who weep (Twitter’s schadenfreude). In a broken world like ours, not all joy is worthy of the name.

This world, however, is not at peace. Consequently, there is much over which we should not rejoice. Love must regulate what gives us joy: love, Paul writes, “does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.” Our emotional lives, Paul is saying, ought to be indexed to the truth of the world as it is. In short, it is more important to feel rightly than to feel good.

Another person’s suffering, for example, should elicit compassion, not joy. “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep,” Paul writes. Solidarity like this requires us to resist modern tendencies to weep over those who rejoice (Instagram’s FOMO) and rejoice over those who weep (Twitter’s schadenfreude). In a broken world like ours, not all joy is worthy of the name.

There is, however, an omnipresent cause for good joy, even in this life: God. Even when life’s circumstances are plainly not as they should be, there is still God, whose loving presence can and should be the cause of joy. That’s why Paul can command joy: “Rejoice in the Lord always.”

How does Paul expect us both to “rejoice always” and to “weep with those who weep”? Note that the command is to rejoice always, not to only rejoice. In this life our joy often must be mixed with sorrow. Rejoice in God, but lament over injustice. Rejoice in God, but weep with a neighbor in pain. Even our joy over genuinely good aspects of the world—the small joy of a sweet wild strawberry or the large joy of reconciling with a long-estranged friend—ought to be tinged with sorrow over the fact that this precious thread is not yet woven into a tapestry of fully flourishing life. In the world as we know it, joys are also always longings. They reach for a world in which they would extend into an unending web of joy. Our joys, Paul insists, ought to be as immodest as our dreams. They ought to reach for a whole world. 

To sum up: in this world, flourishing life is

  1. always and only a life of love,
  2. always but not only a life of joy
  3. neither always nor only a life at peace.

In the end, all three are woven together, but in this life, in which there are circumstances with which it would be wicked to be at peace and over which it would be evil to rejoice, love must come first.

When we dream a life, we dream a world. A world of love, peace, and joy, in harmony with one another. This is the world Jesus’s life summons into being. It lies beyond this immature and evil-stricken world. And yet it summons us. We hunger for it.

Paul affirms this hunger. It is a sign that we were indeed made for more than the lives we experience here and now. And yet it also points to the fact that some foretaste of that life can be discovered here. In little pockets of peace in communities marked by love, there are yet grounds for joy. Grounds that help us see every good thing around us as a gift from God.
 

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At the tilting points of the year, we ask what kind of world we want to build

Equinox is still a threshold between darkness and light.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Sun rise casts a shadow over Stonehenge.
Nik, via Unsplash.

At the spring equinox, we appreciate and talk about the arrival of light in the northern hemisphere. For a brief moment, the Earth’s axis is tilted neither away from or toward the sun, and day and night are roughly equal length – ‘equinox’ is Latin for ‘equal night’. From here, we enter astronomical spring.  

But it is not entirely accurate to talk about this being the moment when the darkness is finally diminished. That moment is the ‘equilux’ – equal light – and it happens a few days before the equinox, its date varying with latitude. Because the sun appears as a disc in the sky, the top half rises above the horizon before its centre does, which – when coupled with light being refracted by the Earth’s atmosphere – gives extra daylight. By the time of the equinox, and depending on your latitude, we already have 12 hours and 10 minutes of daylight. It is not much, but it is enough perhaps to read a few pages of a book without an artificial light, or to have “just one more” kick of a ball outside, as my daughter has learned to say.  

There is beauty in the idea that for a brief moment during the equinox, we are all experiencing the same light and dark. But it is not true. At any particular moment, some of us experience more darkness than others, and some of us receive more light than we think.  

Whenever its moment of arrival, though, the light will arrive. It always has, since the world was set spinning and tilting in space. We have always found ourselves poised at the threshold between the long dark of winter and the gathering light of summer. It is a threshold that is embedded in creation itself; all of life must in one way or another face the work, the inevitability, the challenge of transformation. This threshold is echoed through our own lives too – in the in-between spaces where one thing is ending, but the next has not yet fully begun. There are personal thresholds: a change in career, a birth, a loss. And there are collective ones: times in history when the old ways no longer work and we strain toward something new, unsure of how to get there.  

Ancient people marked the equinox with purpose and care, watching for the moment the sun rose in the east and set in the west. At places like Stonehenge, huge stones were arranged to capture the exact angle of equinoctial light, as if the builders knew this threshold was something worth marking. Recently, archaeologists have suggested that Stonehenge was built not just for religious reasons, but for unification too: its stones come from Cornwall and Wales and Scotland – from all parts of the land. Their slow journey to their resting site on Salisbury plain would have been a chance for celebration and feasting, with thousands of people joining in along the way. It was a journey that would have brought together different people, including groups that had migrated from modern day Europe. Gathering light was a shared effort, and one worth celebrating.  

For the early Celtic world, the equinox was a hinge between Imbolc, the season of early stirrings, and Beltane, the riot of summer. It was a time for reckoning and renewal – counting what food remained after winter, deciding what animals to keep or cull, what seeds to plant. To live well meant paying attention to the balance between what had been and what was to come. Lately, I have realised that it is not change itself that feels hard so much as not knowing the nature of the change that I, that we, will be called to. My young daughter has brought this into sharp focus. On the days when the dark feels relentless and the light seems distant, I find myself fearing for her future. I think of those Celtic people; the way they did not know the future but prepared for it anyway, perhaps in their rituals asking, how do the past and the future speak to each other at this moment, who are we, who might we become?  

Even if we long to cling to what is familiar, the familiar will eventually change. Easter, and the equinox, are not just about light triumphing over darkness, but about transformation.

In a world where crisis seems to be following crisis, it is easy to feel that everything is tipping off balance. The equinox suggests though that equilibrium has never been static, and balance has only ever been fleeting, a transition between states of being. It is a moment of poised readiness, a preparation for movement. The world will keep tilting and tipping as it always has, and we will keep changing as we always have.  

In the Jewish calendar, the equinox often falls near Passover, the great festival of liberation. The story of the Exodus is a story of transition – of leaving behind what enslaves us even when the road ahead is unknown. The Israelites did not step from captivity into freedom overnight. They wandered, and wrestled with doubt, and longed for the certainty of their old lives even as they were being offered something new. Thresholds are rarely comfortable.  

I find myself at a threshold now: I am trying to shape a life that has reformed around motherhood, with past roles and jobs behind me, and the new identities yet to fully clarify. I have been feeling the truth of farmer-author Wendell Berry’s idea that "it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work." This real work has been stimulating but also confronting, as thresholds often are.  

If we are, as many believe, living through a threshold moment in history – where old systems are failing, where climate and conflict threaten the future – how do we walk forward? How do we resist the temptation to cling to what is familiar, even when it no longer serves us? Easter falls just after the equinox. Shoots push through soil, lambs stumble into life, a chorus of birdsong swells, and we remember that nature is all resurrection. Even if we long to cling to what is familiar, the familiar will eventually change. Easter, and the equinox, are not just about light triumphing over darkness, but about transformation. Jesus did not return from the tomb unchanged; he was made new, unrecognisable at first, even to his closest friends.  

The balance of light and dark is fleeting; it does not last; a threshold is not a place to linger. The world is always moving towards light, or toward dark, but always through change, and so are we. Balance is not an end in itself; it is a preparation for change. Perhaps these tilting points of the year are good moments to ask who we are becoming, and what kind of world we want to build, and how we will bear witness to the light, but also to the dark, as we do so.  

This equinox, then, we will turn and face the coming light, but perhaps too we might turn and notice the faces that the light shines on – or doesn’t. Virginia Woolf reminds us that "A light here required a shadow there." When the light comes, darkness will too. These turning points of the year are an opportunity to sit in the truth of that, to appreciate the hope and the beauty of this spring threshold, but also to get to work. We can reach out to those who are experiencing more darkness than us, help build the world in such a way that draws attention to the light like the makers of Stonehenge did, take stock of what has been and who we are becoming, step away from what enslaves us even if we are not yet sure of the shape of freedom.  

We cannot know what will happen next, but we can choose how to move forward. I wonder about those ancient people who somehow moved huge stones weighing up to 30 tons to Stonehenge; I wonder what they saw as they moved through the land, when they looked to the horizon, when they stood in the tension of their own now. They carried not just the weight of stone, but of their own unknowable future. Those ancient people persisted and celebrated and became us, passing on their burden, passing on their particular stone-bound, collectively built way of focusing the light. This equinox, I am thinking about how I can do the same – despite and because of the darkness, despite and because of the unknown path ahead. 

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