The Difference Between Joy and Happiness

I'm not sure how we started talking about JOY and HAPPINESS... It was one of those meandering conversations between friends...

Later she passed on this quote from the book, The Hungering Dark, by Frederick Boechner - and I thought his wise words needed to be shared:

We need to be reminded that at its heart, Christianity is joy and that laughter and freedom and the reaching out of arms are the essence of it.

We need to be reminded too that joy is not the same as happiness. Happiness is man-made - a happy home, a happy marriage, a happy relationship with our friends and within our jobs. We work for these things, and if we are careful and wise and lucky, we can usually achieve them.

Happiness is one of the highest achievements of which we are capable and when it is ours, we take credit for it, and properly so. But we never take credit for our moments of joy because we know they are not man-made and that we are never really responsible for them. They come when they come. They are always sudden and quick and unrepeatable.

The unspeakable joy of just being alive. The miracle sometimes of just being who we are with the blue sky and the green grass, the faces of our friends and the waves of the ocean, just being what they are. The joy of release, of being suddenly well when before we were sick, of being forgiven when before we were ashamed and afraid, of finding ourselves loved when we were lost and alone. The joy of love, which is a joy of the flesh as well as the spirit...

Joy is always all encompassing. There is nothing of us left over to hate with or be afraid with, to feel guilty with or to be selfish about. Joy is where the whole being is pointed in one direction, and it is something that by its nature, a man never hoards but always wants to share. The second thing is that joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes...