The Double Rainbow and the Yellow Plane
The other day I went to see an older man whose wife died last summer. His son was there, too, and it was obvious as they talked what a remarkable person this woman was and how much they loved her.
The son told me this story—that not long after his mother died, he was driving down a road. And he looked up at the sky, and there was a double rainbow, very bright, every band of color in both of them clear and shining and distinct–it was beautiful, and sudden, and his heart lifted up. He thought, mom. Mom.
This is how I think joy is. This is how it works.
The gospel today is about joy, as every gospel is–Pope Francis called his first exhortation The Joy of the Gospel–but today the gospel describes joy itself, the joy of the disciples when they see the risen Lord, a joy so intense they can’t believe it at first.
And this is really important. “Joy is an infallible sign of the presence of God,” as Teilhard de Chardin puts it, and today’s gospel describes the circumstances of joy and the qualities of joy, not just for the disciples but for us.
Let me just make a list.
Joy isn’t something we can schedule. It’s not something we can produce. It just happens, it just appears, as Jesus just appears to the disciples, out of the blue, when they least expect it.
Joy isn’t something we can earn. We don’t deserve it. It comes to us even when we’ve not been doing too well, like the disciples today. They’re a pretty unimpressive bunch so far, and yet Jesus comes to them anyway.
Joy isn’t happiness, because we can do things to be happy–we can make ourselves happy—but joy is always a gift, always a surprise.
Joy comes even in the midst of darkness and suffering and grief, as Jesus comes to the disciples today in their fear and confusion, and the joy they feel doesn’t take away all the pain or remove all the challenges to come.
Joy doesn’t make things easy. It gives us strength.
Joy is deeper than pain. Joy survives even suffering and doubt.
Joy can be intense, as it is today for the disciples. We might feel joy like this only once or twice in our lives.
And joy can be subtle, too, soft, elusive, woven into everything that happens to us. A man falls in beside us on a road. We sit at a table with friends.
Joy is something we often forget. Even those intense moments fade, and the subtler moments, the everyday moments–we forget them all the time. We’re too busy. We’re preoccupied.
Joy is something we can misinterpret, we mistake joy for a ghost, we think it’s unreal.
Joy is something we always doubt, even when it’s overwhelming—the disciples are so joyous today they’re incredulous. They can’t believe what they see. It’s all too good to be true.
Joy is fleeting–we only just glimpse the Lord and he’s gone–the way he disappears in the story of Emmaus, before this in Luke, vanishing at just the moment the disciples finally recognize him.
And yet joy never dies, it never fades—if we learn the discipline of remembering it, if we make a commitment to it and choose to trust it even in the darkness.
Joy is one of the nine fruits of the Spirit, the theme of our series of homilies this Easter season. Paul lays them out in Galatians. Last week we talked about peace, and next week we’ll talk about gentleness and patience, and later the others, and nothing is more important than knowing what these are. Because it’s from the fruits of the Spirit that we can reason back to their source. Joy is a sign of the presence of God, Chardin says, and we need signs. We’re not the disciples. We don’t get to experience Jesus directly the way they did. Jesus is present to us indirectly, in the Spirit he left us, and the Spirit is quiet, it moves “between the lines of persons and things,” as Abbot Jeremy Driscoll puts it, and so we need to pay attention to what’s going on in our lives and to what’s going on inside us.
God isn’t dead. He’s here and all around us. We just have to learn what to look for–we just have to learn discernment.
The disciples are terrified of Jesus at first today, but fear like that is never from God.
Anger, hatred, envy—all “the fruits of the flesh”–they are never from God.
That sense of worthlessness so many of us feel, or that sense of hopelessness we sometimes feel—they are never from God.
Joy is a going out of ourselves, a being swept up into something beyond us.
Joy is an awareness of a beauty within us. Joy is an awareness of a beauty in others. Joy is an awareness of a beauty and a goodness coursing through the world, however terrible things seem, a light that the darkness can never finally overwhelm.
Joy gives us courage, but it asks for courage, too. We first have to trust it. We first have to risk it.
By his Resurrection, the Catechism tells us, Jesus opens for us the way to a new life. The Resurrection reinstates us in God’s grace, it says, quoting St. Paul, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Joy is the gift of the Resurrection, and it changes us. It transforms us. It enables us to live in a radically new way, with confidence and creativity and compassion.
Joy is the proof of the Resurrection, because the Risen Christ is here, in this very place, right now, in us.
Last week, as we were sitting at the kitchen table eating cinnamon rolls and drinking coffee, the man whose wife died got up and brought back this wonderful picture of the two of them many years ago. A yellow Cessna 180 is floating on a mountain lake, and they’re standing beside it, on one of the pontoons. He is young and handsome, and she is young and beautiful, the wind has just ruffled her hair, and she’s looking at the camera with this love and this life and this joy in her eyes, and that love and that joy were still there, they were moving in the air of the room, even though the man was choking up as he talked. They were both bush pilots in Alaska, he said–his wife was a doctor–and this Cessna was their plane, it was their honeymoon plane, they were always flying, and this was the way his wife was–she always had a spirit of adventure, her whole life was an adventure, and it still is, he said. The adventure, he told me, is still going on.
This is joy. This is the sign of the presence of God. Deeper than tears. Something remembered. Something held onto. Something believed: that this woman is flying still, in that bright yellow plane, she is soaring, as one day we too will fly. We too will soar.