There are ambush moments in life which jerk us out of the routine, familiar, unsurpising predictability of everyday actions.
Like going out to the car, opening the door, putting on the seat-belt and putting the key in the ignition.
Then the sun shines through the external condensation on the windscreen, which earlier in the morning crystallised into ice, and now there is a filtered light masterpiece a foot from your face.
And I wonder at the way the ordinary transfigures before our eyes by an illumination that comes from beyond ourselves, but touches the deep core of wherever joy comes from.
What are the constituent elements of joy? Can it be analysed by an emotional spectrometer, that clever instrument that can "measure a continuous variable of a phenomenon where the spectral components are somehow mixed"?
Certainly I have found that joy is a "continuous variable" of mixed components. The joy of love, and hope, and discovery; the joy of laughter, achievement, music; the joy of a friend's voice, a skein of geese, a perfectly timed football shot; the joy of reconciliation after an argument, of a shared meal, of silence in good company. And on it goes.
I've sometimes wondered if joy is one of the more persuasive arguments for God, by which I mean those moments of ambush that take us out of our own heads, touch us to a new attentiveness, and so change the way we see the world.
So a frosted windscreen becomes a sacrament of grace, a nudge towards joy, well more of a rugby players shoulder charge impelling us outwards to a world we now notice, and learn to love again.
There's no point in going looking for joy, it usually comes looking for us. Unless we are too busy to notice it, too preoccupied by what's going on in our own heads and hearts.
But all the time, God lays ambushes, plots against our well worn routines that obscure those continuously variable signs and sacraments of God's beauty, truth and goodness.
Like when sunlight turns a frosted windscreen into a sheet of liturgical lalique! (See photo)
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