At lunch a couple days ago, a friend asked "Do you have any spiritual needs?" I looked away from his searching face, to the salt shaker, as if the answer might lie there. I know the answer. It's a rhetorical question. And yet I had to think about it for a moment, as it is one of those questions that doesn't often get asked, particularly by one man to another. I look up, meet his eyes.

"Joy," I said. "I need the joy of the Lord. Scripture says 'Rejoice in the Lord always,' but how do I do that?"

Joy does not equate to happiness. Joy is a depth charge, exploding underneath, reverberating; happiness, a flash on the surface, ephemeral. Bob Dylan captured it best in a 1991 Rolling Stone interview. “Happiness, “said Dylan, “is not on my list of priorities. I just deal with day-to-day things.” His interlocutor records that he fell silent for a few moments and stared at his hands. “You know,” he said, “these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness, it’s either blessed or unblessed. As the Bible says, ‘Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.’ Now, that must be a happy man. Knowing that you are the person you were put on this earth to be – that’s much more important than just being happy.”

After seeing my daughter off early this morning, my wife and I took to the darkened streets. The mist hung over us, curling around muted streetlights. For at least ten blocks we saw neither person nor car. Mostly, we were silent but for the offbeat footfalls and swish of clothing, the occasional audible prayers juxtaposed with the silent company of God. We crossed a stream swollen with the rain from the previous day. Water is a magnet, so we always look down at its hypnotic draw. Floating about in the mush of my barely awake mind was that phrase from the first line of the Creed: “God the Father Almighty.” And then another word that the Apostles use time and again of us, of me: “beloved.” Like a tiny jigsaw puzzle of weighty pieces, I put it together: The Almighty God calls me beloved. Jesus loves me. Though elementary, it’s a puzzle I must rework every day.

Happy? I don’t think much about being happy. Nor do I think much about being sad. But when I consider an almighty God calling me beloved, my brooding over the world and over me - my blessed mourning, to use the beatitude - is riven by joy, by some inarticulable sense that I am out walking just where He wants me, that I am blessed. C.S. Lewis once said that joy “jumps under one’s ribs and tickles down one’s back and makes one forget meals and keeps one (delightedly) sleepless o’ nights. It shocks one awake when the other [just doing well] puts one to sleep.” I think such experience a rare, unbidden treat. As Lewis said in his memoir, “Joy is never in our power.” Yet by focusing on the tidal wave he missed the steady lapping wave of joy, the irrepressible love of a Savior who bids us come.

I told my friend across the table that sometimes, after being reminded by a judge that I don’t know anything or, at least, that what I know is inadequate, I feel dejected, and I am deeply aware of my inadequacy. I try not to harden my defenses to this by getting angry or by silent protestations of my rightness. After leaving the courtroom, I let the heavy door shut, take the elevator back to my office, and entering slump at my desk. I look at my hands, their lines and creases testifying to the friction of life and time, of water under the bridge, and with a sigh of relief say to myself, “Well, Jesus loves me anyway. Jesus loves me. God almighty, Jesus loves me.”

That’s all I need. That’s joy. That’s a keyhole to the light of eternity.