This Year for Joy: A Day by Day Guide To Care for the Soul

By Josephine Griffiths

This Year for Joy will inspire, instruct, challenge, amuse, but most of all, delight the reader. The daily readings are a pot pourri of myths, meditations, poems and the occasional anecdote blended with stories and legends of long forgotten saints - the fabulous and the fantastic! These old stories offer wonderful food for the soul for those of

• Language: English
• Publisher: Josephine Griffiths
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9780648169710

Book preview

Introduction

Mix a little foolishness with your seriousness; it is lovely to be silly at the right moment. Horace

This Year for Joy is designed as bedside book, or daybook, for people who have done a bit of growing, living and thinking about the meaning of life. It is for people who know that all of life is encompassed by the sacred. This Year for Joy is a medley or miscellany that will appeal particularly, though not exclusively, to those whose spirituality has been shaped by the Christian story. It is at heart serious, but is intended for delight, therefore, you will find it sprinkled with foolishness, and occasionally being downright silly. The daily readings are a potpourri of myths, meditations, poems and the occasional anecdote. There are suggestions for activities or meditations for most days, and each month clusters loosely around a theme. This theme has not been arbitrarily attributed, but has arisen out of the background material which was chosen as the peg on which to hang these readings. This peg is the old calendar of saints, the long-forgotten and fantastic folk who were ‘lights in their generation’, whose stories illuminated the lives of less critical ages. Only rarely have famous, familiar or recent saints rated a mention.

The old saints, especially the ones who have been debunked, offer wonderful stories to nurture the souls of those of us who are happy to dispense with historical accuracy as the only criterion of truth. Myth is a vital and living reality necessary to foster the creative imaginal world. Myth feeds the soul. ‘Myth’, to quote another ancient Roman, ‘never happened but always is’ and so it can speak over and over, differently, to succeeding generations and take them where good, solid, rational doctrine never can. As that great interpreter of fairy tales, Marie Louise von Franz says, ‘our rational outlook on life includes being reasonable.... reasonableness excludes all symbolism...life is much richer for people embedded in the living symbolism of their religious forms.’

I have put this collection together because I believe Christianity still harbours living symbols that have the capacity to foster a ‘much richer life’. However, here I have chosen, for the most part, to use symbols that are little known or forgotten, and to place them in a wider spiritual context than the strict forms of religious orthodoxy. The inside cover picture of Llanthony Priory in S.Wales captures the theme beautifully with the sunlight streaming through the derelict chapel.

The meditations and activities suggested flow out of the stories. They are opportunities to integrate, or to bring the symbolic into daily life. Sometimes these ideas are personal sometimes they have a wider frame of reference. I believe our spirituality is real and meaningful to the extent that it actualises in life; in improved relationships to ourselves, to our loved ones, to those we find difficult, and in our concern for the wider world. Our interaction with issues of the world far from home may be limited by opportunity, but that does not obviate the need for responsible attitudes.

We who have the leisure, the resources and the opportunity to select from a vast array of available reading matter are apt to forget that it is one of the many privileges we enjoy, and take for granted. Those of us who live in a position of plenty have, at the very least, a responsibility to be thoughtful and cheerful; thoughtful because this is how we stay connected to the realities of life on this planet, cheerful because we cannot make any useful contribution by being miserable. We all know that many people suffer constantly from famine, disease and other disasters, natural and/or those constructed by the will of man. Remaining thoughtful/prayerful is one way most of us can do something useful; our willingness to be connected will keep us open to other possibilities that may present themselves.

Acknowledging the pain and sorrow throughout the world, and stating, alongside it, a responsibility to be cheerful, may sound somewhat frivolous, but not so. We need to stay cheerful to balance the steady diet of misery and gloom that is presented to us by the media, under the guise of information, but which is, in fact, frequently geared to alarm, appall, frighten and confirm well-worn prejudices. Being doleful achieves nothing; doleful is quite the reverse of truly acknowledging our own or others’ pain. A diet of news bulletins can paralyse us or, alternatively, immunise us against reality.

Ordinary cheerfulness is a counterbalance; it is way of personal responsibility. This may sound trivial, but the notion has merit. I am not talking here about the forced cheerfulness of what someone famous once called ‘bloody smiling Christians’. I am talking about responsibility in respect of our own problems, states of mind and our moods; a decision not to make the world wear our problems. Neither am I advocating a stoical refusal to let anyone share our pain, that is why I call it ‘ordinary cheerfulness’; it has a basic kind of honesty and the maturity we aim for. The suggestions, etc. in these pieces assume that desire for maturity and affirm an attitude of personal responsibility.

In a book loosely held together by the Christian calendar you may be surprised to find Christmas the only major festival included; that is because it is the only one that stays put! Easter, and the fasts and festivals calculated from it, cannot easily be accommodated in a book designed for no particular year. You will, however, find restoration, regeneration and the resurrection of the body as constant points of reference throughout the year.

As This Year for Joy is not intended as a work of reference I have kept notes to the minimum, and relegated them to the back of the book, where you will also find a selected bibliography. Dates that appear in brackets beside the names refer to the putative date of the death of the saint. Instances where the guess is within a century probably means that we are in the realm of pure myth.

The year concludes with the wonderful affirmation of Mother Julian of Norwich. Julian lived in a time of widespread anxiety and ‘distress of nations’, including that terrible scourge, the Black Death. In the face of this, her deep connectedness to the sacred, which allowed her to declare that ‘all manner of things shall be well’, is a great example and statement of hope for our time, also.

Josephine Griffiths

Perth, W.A.

Christmas 2015

JANUARY

The Miracle

I have no name

I am but three days old -

What shall I call thee?

I happy am

Joy is my name

Sweet Joy befall thee

William Blake

One feels the brightness gleam from a new page, on which all yet may come to be

R.M.Rilke

JANUARY 1 is really just another day, yet few of us are immune to the sense of a new beginning. This is the day to make those pie-crust resolutions, designed to be broken, and to project up on the screen of our minds the visions that we have for the year ahead, what we want to achieve, who we want to be. The being is primary, the doing flows out of who we are. The real challenge for New Year’s Day, and for every day of the year, is to claim our uniqueness, foster our own genius and to live fully who we are; that is the ‘all that may yet come to be’, of this year.

The first day of the year, in the Christian calendar, seems to have little enough to do with women fostering their own genius, or with men claiming their own uniqueness. January 1 celebrates the Circumcision of Jesus, when He was ritually marked with the sign of the tribe. Being branded as a member of the family, the clan, the tribe or the nation has always been of prime importance, especially to the men of the tribe. Being a member of the group can rob us of the experience of our uniqueness, our sense of selfhood, even. Our times have seen the potential for horror that can be let loose when commitment to the tribe or nation takes the place of personal responsibility.

Each one of us is an essential self. We have a uniqueness, a me-ness that lies beneath the identities we construct to manage our lives. No matter what marks we bear, physical or psychical, of our family, tribe, or nationality, this essential self exists and cannot be reduced back to environment, nurturance or any other external cause. Jesus lived and died a devout Jew, but above and beyond that formal commitment He was true to Himself, to His own peculiar genius. He lived His uniqueness. If we see Him as the ideal of human life then, imitating Him, we too will choose to live our own uniqueness.

What are your dreams and desires for the year ahead?

DAY 2 St Seraphim (1833) perfected the art of shining. Speaking with him was a dazzling experience, as one disciple exclaimed: I cannot look on you Father, for your eyes are flashing like lightening. Your face has become brighter than the sun and it hurts my eyes to look at you, But Seraphim’s light was infectious, for he answered, Do not be afraid, for you have become as bright as I am. Happiness, brightness, cheeriness are contagious and we all shine when we encounter them in others. Our lives are not always bright and the false cheerfulness that denies pain can be very off-putting, but we can be real when life is tough if we accept that other people do not need to ‘wear’ our problems. We can maintain self-responsibility and adopt an attitude of openness. This way of being not only shines for others, but gives us a firmer ground on which to meet the challenges we face. Smiling creates a physiological change in our brains that enhances well-being.

See how many people you can get to smile today.

DAY 3 St Genevieve (500) was dedicated to holiness and a quiet life, but found herself playing a public role in a war torn country. In times of siege she made sorties to find food and is credited with saving the city of Paris from destruction by the Huns. It is said that, at prayer, in the middle of the night, the devil would blow out her candle. Many of us can relate to that, though we may not think in terms of ‘the devil’.

When we have been getting on with what needs to be done, making sorties into alien places to find nourishment or going public with our talents, it is not unusual, in the night watches, to lose our vision. Inside our heads we hear the habitual criticisms, the voices of self-doubt that tell us of the folly of thinking we have something to give. These are the demons that extinguish our light. Genevieve’s answer was to recognise the gloom for what it was, a mere ‘trick of the devil’. Call it the devil, fear, the Shadow, a residual fear from childhood, or what you will, the voice is familiar and the effect is the same. As Genevieve discovered, to press on regardless and not to allow the inner vision to be impaired is the way to ‘entertain angels unawares’ and keep the light burning.

In your quiet do not fret about the demon thoughts, simply accept them and let them go.

DAY 4 St Elizabeth Seton (1821) Dreams and visions are a clue to our spiritual nature and we are all, naturally, spiritual, but we are not all religious. These days the two are not the same, we think of a religious person as belonging formally, or informally, to a recognised religion. A person who is spiritually aware pursues the life of the spirit whether inside an organised church or not. It is just as possible for a spiritual person not to belong to a religious group as it is for religious people not to develop their spiritual selves. Elizabeth Seton, the first native saint of USA, is accredited with both. At her canonisation Pope Paul VI praised her witness to religious spirituality which... temporal prosperity seemed to obscure and almost make impossible.

Witnessing to spiritual values in the everyday world is a regular challenge; the task is even harder when our spirituality is no longer explicitly religious. Keeping our vision clear and staying true, this is sometimes the best we can do. For this we are unlikely to be canonised!

What are your best resources for keeping your vision clear?

DAY 5 Twelfth Night If music be the food of love, play on....... Who has not expressed in music, whether from Giuseppe Verdi, Cole Porter, Billy Joel or any number of others, the experience of love? The words and music of the greats give us vehicles for our passion, our joys or disappointments. The great mystics have done the same for the spiritual passions and a world without Shakespeare, Mozart or Michelangelo is unimaginable. And that goes for the many great souls who have expressed the breadth of the human spirit in enduring form. Take time, today, to give thanks for music, for love, for poetry and for the luminaries of our cultural heritage.

Give yourself a treat by enjoying some art or music today

DAY 6 The Feast of the Epiphany Speaking of luminaries and pleasure, today is the anniversary of the death of Rudolph Nureyev, (1993) the great dancer who gave enormous pleasure to ballet lovers the world over.

A sad Epiphany story

In a certain Sunday-school, long, long ago, there was a special seat, which was occupied by the birthday girl/boy of the week. One little person had his birthday on the Feast of the Epiphany and, as Sunday-school was always in recess, he never got to sit on that special seat. He never felt special.

In maturity we do not look for affirmation from the outside, our sense of selfhood is an inner reality that sustains us. People who achieve this do not mind missing out on the birthday seats of life. Every society, like that Sunday-school, has ways to mark specialness, recognition, appreciation or approval, but if we never receive these, developing an inner sense of worth is more difficult.

Mothers are a case in point. In our society, though lip service is paid to the importance of their task, there is no genuine recognition. The accepted social and public marks of recognition of specialness, approval, or appreciation for the contribution they make to the world, are not there. Even among feminists there can be a disastrous downplay of the role, as though a woman is only a real woman if she continues to maintain her place in the world of men, while pregnant or child-rearing. In some ways feminism has made the appreciation of motherhood more, rather than less, difficult.

There is a legend of a fourth Wise Man who was so busy serving others on his way to Bethlehem that he arrived, with no gift, in time for the Crucifixion. He missed out on the glamour of stars and gold and stuff and his gifts were all used up on those in need.

Give a token to a mother today to tell her she is wonderful.

DAY 7 Ss Hywn and Caentigerna (733)Two saints, of whom you have probably never heard, but then, what makes a saint? These days canonisation is a long and official process in which every aspect of the candidate’s life is minutely raked over and considered by committees and commissions. In earlier centuries the process was simpler. Women and men who were lights in their generation, who lived their truth in simple faith, who were known, after death, still to care, were given the accolade by grateful suppliants.

The miracles at the tombs of saints attest to the ongoing relevance of love, the belief that love alone transcends mortality. In their day these ancients were just like the rest of us Who are only undefeated/Because we have gone on trying (as T S Eliot describes it) Doing whatever came up with honesty and dedication; getting on with the jobs, finding and shedding our light in the ordinariness of life; therein lies the sacred. Hywn and Caentigerna are two forgotten Celtic saints whose ‘ordinary lives’ inspired those among whom they lived and died, and whose love lingered on.

Affirmation: I shed light in all I do today.

DAY 8 St Pega (719) The next few days celebrate more saints of whom we never hear. A common theme in their stories is the joy they had in valuing the gifts of others. Pega is the first example. She had a brother, Gunthlac, who was, like her, a hermit. They lived not five miles from each other, but did not meet. He wanted to concentrate on heaven and would, he felt sure, have plenty of time to see her there. He only sent for her as he lay a-dying. She arrived too late, but spent three days praising God for the greatness of her brother. Her devotion to her brother was not grounded in familial expression, but in appreciation of his separateness and willingness to live his truth. In our commitment to family ideals we do not always allow the particular genius or uniqueness to flourish. ‘The family’ as an ideal in itself is something we sometimes need to question.

How do you affirm the uniqueness and separateness of family members?

DAY 9 St Adrian of Canterbury (709) Citizens of the later Roman Empire, in a very real sense, lived in ‘one world’ such as we cannot achieve today. Roman rule and the Christian faith created a worldwide community that transcended national boundaries. Each citizen of Rome could be at home anywhere. Adrian of Canterbury for example, was African; nevertheless he was given the see of Canterbury, to be its archbishop. Adrian pushed for his friend Theodore to get the job, as he was the more capable. Adrian was allowed to pass up the honour provided he went with Theodore as adviser. While there he founded the Canterbury school which held great prestige as a centre of learning for many centuries. Adrian appreciated his friend’s gifts and saw him as deserving of the greater honour. Events seem to have proved him right.

Take every opportunity today to speak praise of others.

DAY 10 St Paul the First Hermit (345) This Paul has been deleted from the official calendar. St. Anthony is now credited with beginning the eremitic tradition; his is a more believable story, whereas Paul’s is fantastical. As told by St. Jerome, it is adorned with wild beasts, half human, half animal, and a couple of lions thrown in to dig the hermit’s grave. According to Jerome, Anthony went on a pilgrimage to find the one who was a better hermit than he. (There is something delicious about the hermit’s commitment to a holy life still being capable of competition!) He found Paul and they greeted each other in love, but did not spend a long time together because Paul knew he was dying and preferred to do it alone, so he sent Anthony off on a quest. Paul is included here, not only for the pleasure of the fantastical story, but also for the description of his home in a deserted Egyptian settlement, which makes an appealing meditative symbol.

A spacious courtyard open to the sky, roofed by the wide spreading branches of an ancient palm, and with a spring of clear shining water: a stream ran hastening from it and was soon drunk again…… by the same earth that had given its waters birth.

For your meditation imagine yourself in the solitude of the desert, in a place where even loved ones do not stay.

DAY 11 According to Jungian writer James Hillman

The more recent rationalised church has been downsizing the invisible realm, submitting its imagination to historical criteria. Every invisible saint had to have a visible forebear with a historical pedigree. So we lost St. Christopher and others who were ‘sheer myths.’

If you have meditated in that deserted Egyptian settlement of Paul the First Hermit you have shared, in some sense, his solitude and, therefore, in his history. How do you feel about valuing what James Hillman calls ‘the invisibles’? Is there room in your thinking for ‘that great cloud of witnesses’ of the unseen? History records the fashions of the times but is historical accuracy the only criterion of value? Who decides what is and what isn’t history?

How much do you value your imaginal world?

DAY 12 George Fox (1691) The Quaker Movement has two great attributes. The first is silence; the second is the intent to value equally the contribution of all the members. George Fox the founder of the Quaker Movement is remembered today. His contemplative experiences were in line with the saints and mystics of every generation. He was ‘brought through a very ocean of darkness and death’ into ‘the greatness and infinitude of the love of God which cannot be expressed in words. An infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of darkness.’

Valuing our own experience, holding firm in the silence against the voices which say ‘This is all folly’, is the work of contemplation; as is suffering the ocean of darkness and death. Coming to the knowledge of the infinitude of Love is its reward. Not once, but repeatedly, as we continue in prayer, we know new levels of darkness and enter fresh fields of joy.

For today’s meditation immerse yourself in the infinite ocean of light and love.

DAY 13 St Kentigern (612) Some of the stories of saints read like familiar fairy tales and, like fairy tales, carry archetypal motifs that have perpetual relevance. The story of Kentigern includes the motif of losing something valuable in the ocean to have it returned in the mouth of a fish. This is a version of the myth of the restoration of wholeness, which is a fundamental myth of many cultures. Abbot Kentigern was adviser to the queen. She was given a ring by her husband, but she, in turn, gave it to one of her lovers. The king reclaimed the ring then threw it out to sea and told her she must retrieve it in three days. The queen was saved when one of Kentigern’s monks found the ring in a salmon he had caught while fishing.

The ring is the symbol of the union, which the queen did not value, but put at risk, and thus endangered the peace of the realm. Retrieving the ring meant restoring harmony both in the marriage and the land. The three days, inevitably, carried the death/resurrection motif, a transformation that cannot be achieved without help from Beyond. The fish, coming up from the depths, represents the Self, or the Christ figure, emerging once more into consciousness and restoring the configuration of wholeness. This myth is both personal and collective since the king and queen represent the land or the community. Their union and wellbeing guarantee the safety of the people. The breaking of that union is a sore trial, which needs supernatural aid to restore to oneness.

The inability to value what is truly ours is a frequent theme in stories and in our personal myths. We must go through ‘hell and high water’ to regain what we have lost, and we cannot achieve our restoration without aid coming from the depths. The reunion of the king and queen represents the completion in wholeness, both personal and collective. There is a profound truth carried within this tale, a very particular kind of history. Myth never happened, but always is.

Have you ever considered your own myth of wholeness?

DAY 14 St Hilary (368) was one of the great architects of the Christian creeds. The doctors of the church so valued right doctrine that they gave their lives to its preservation and often, as Hilary, suffered for their commitment. To them, holding fast to the truth, getting the words right, without ambiguity, was a guarantee, an anchor for the church. We have benefited from their efforts, of that there is no doubt, but this holding fast is a two edged sword. We lost a great deal for which they could not find room, and the church two thousand years on, is committed to forms of words which cannot encompass the meaning of the universe as we understand it. While we try to recognise and to reclaim the aspects of religious experience the Fathers excluded we must not deny the value of what they did. Civilisation as we know it owes a great deal to the early fathers of the church. Without them there would be no recognisable church to have shaped us, no form against which to define Reality. Many historians would say that in the dark ages it was only the church that saved civilisation from complete disintegration.

With all its shortcomings we have a lot to be grateful for in our Christian heritage.

DAY 15 St Ceolwulf (8th) Bede is a good example of fashions in history. In 731 he completed his History of the English Church and People which is the primary document for our knowledge of the early days of Christianity in Britain. However, much that he records is, according to our lights, non-history, like the records he gives of bodies of saints found incorrupt after many years in the tomb. His interpretations depend on the fabulous and the miraculous, but we do not have to take them literally. We have chosen to take his stories as myths which admit of symbolic interpretations, and so we keep our cultural past, rather than ditching it because it no longer meets our more prosaic ways of explaining the world.

Bede dedicated his great historical work to another unknown saint, who was celebrated on this day, a king of Northumbria named Ceolwulf. Bede valued Ceolwulf’s piety, but was not so enthusiastic about his statesmanship, and he was quite clear about communicating this to the king, his friend. Being able to value our friends without compromise is a difficult skill to develop; being honest with our friends is a virtue more often claimed than experienced.

Two questions to consider: What do you value most about friendship? Do your friendships survive disagreement?

DAY 16 St Fursey (650) In Charles Kingley’s tale, The Water Babies there are two angelic beings who promote the life lessons of ‘Do-as-you-would-be-done-by’ and ‘Be-done-by-as-you-did’. These precepts could be the theme of next few stories.

Bede tells of Fursey who had visions of the afterlife. In these visions he was shown the earth, over which four fires burned. These fires represented falsehood, covetousness, discord and injustice. When Fursey cried out in fear of being burned his angel guide said, Fear not it will not burn you because you did not kindle it. Only the fires we kindle will burn us. A happy thought; if we do not deal in lies, envy, quarrelling and injustice we cannot be burnt by them. This is not to say we will not have to encounter them, only that we will not be permanently scarred by them. Do-as-you-would-be-done-by is a biblical precept that is often not self-reflective.

Do you treat yourself with the same compassion that you show to others?

DAY 17 St Anthony of Egypt (356) We met this