even if just a little, making you a little more elevated or a little more degraded. If you do a series of good deeds, the habit of other-centeredness becomes gradually engraved into your life. It becomes easier to do good deeds down the line. If you lie or behave callously or cruelly toward someone, your personality degrades, and it is easier for you to do something even worse later on. As the criminologists say, the people who commit murder don’t start there. They have to walk through a lot of doors before they get to the point where they can take another human life.
The people who radiate a permanent joy have given themselves over to lives of deep and loving commitment. Giving has become their nature, and little by little they have made their souls incandescent. There’s always something flowing out of the interiority of our spirit. For some people it’s mostly fear or insecurity. For the people we call joyful, it’s mostly gratitude, delight, and kindness.
How do you build your personality to glow in this way? You might think a bright personality would come from an unburdened life—a life of pleasures and constant delights. But if you closely look at joyful people, you notice that very often the people who have the most incandescent souls have taken on the heaviest burdens.
Benjamin Hardy is a writer who described his decision to take on three foster children in Inc. magazine. “Before having that personal load to carry, I was somewhat complacent. I lacked the urgency. I didn’t have the traction to move forward,” he writes. “A life of ease is not the pathway to growth and happiness. On the contrary, a life of ease is how you get stuck and confused in life.” Taking on those kids meant knowing more about frustration, anxiety, and fatigue, but also elation, sweetness, and especially caring love. Happiness can be tasted alone. But permanent joy comes out of an enmeshed and embedded life. Happiness happens when a personal desire is fulfilled. Permanent moral joy seems to emerge when desire is turned outward for others.
Gregory Boyle ministers to gang members in Los Angeles and captures the difference between a life lived for self and one lived for others: “Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship.” It’s one of the inescapable truisms of life: You have to lose yourself to find yourself, give yourself away to get everything back.
You might think this kind of life of joyous service is rare. But in the spring of 2018, I began a project called Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute. The idea is to shine attention on the people who are doing the grassroots work of community building and relationship repair. In the course of that work I’ve found myself surrounded by incandescent people almost every day.
There is Stephanie Hruzek in Houston, sitting cross-legged on the floor with kids at FamilyPoint, her after-school program, gleefully repeating tongue twisters with them: “Say ‘Unique New York’ ten times fast!” There is Kate Garvin in Colorado, being greeted by squeals of delight when she comes across a Somali refugee she is helping to integrate into the local school system. There’s Don Flow, who owns a chain of car dealerships in North Carolina and who radiates a quiet satisfaction showing the community center he built in Winston-Salem. There’s Harlan Crow, a real estate developer whose every moment, it seems, is devoted to helping the people around him be more comfortable.
There is Mack McCarter, founder of Community Renewal International in Shreveport, Louisiana. Mack is in his seventies. He’s one of those people when the first time he walks into a coffee shop he learns everybody’s first name and has a joke and story for them all. By his third visit he’s everybody’s old friend. By his fifth, they want him to officiate at their wedding. People just want to be around the guy because he is flowing joy.
I ask these people what brings joy to their daily lives. The answer is always a variation on the same theme—some moment when they brought delight to another. “There is joy in self-forgetfulness,” Helen Keller observed. “So I try to make the light in others’ eyes my sun, the music in others’ ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness.”
Miroslav Volf is a professor at Yale who has made studying joy his specialty. Joy is