fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace.”
Other people, though not explicitly religious, also experience moments when love seems to shine down on them. Jules Evans was skiing at age twenty-four when he fell off a cliff, dropped thirty feet, and broke his leg and back. “As I lay there I felt immersed in love and light. I’d been suffering from emotional problems for six years and feared my ego was permanently damaged. In that moment, I knew that I was OK, I was loved, that there was something in me that could not be damaged, call it ‘the soul,’ or ‘the self,’ ‘pure consciousness’ or what have you.”
In 2016, the Gallup organization asked Americans if they had had a mystical experience, a moment when they went beyond their ordinary self and felt connected to some infinity. Eighty-four percent of respondents said they had had such an experience at least once, even as 75 percent said there’s a social taboo against speaking about it in public.
MORAL JOY
Here I want to shift now to the highest layer of joy, which I’ll call moral joy. I say this is the highest form of joy in part because this is the kind that even the skeptics can’t explain away. The skeptics could say that all those other kinds of passing joy are just brain chemicals in some weird formation that happened to have kicked in to produce odd sensations. But moral joy has an extra feature. It can become permanent. Some people live joyfully day by day. Their daily actions are aligned with their ultimate commitments. They have given themselves away, united and wholeheartedly. They are so grateful to have found their place and taken their stand. They have the inner light.
Pope Francis seems to have this, and so, it is said, do Bishop Tutu and Paul Farmer. So do Geoffrey Canada, who founded the Harlem Children’s Zone, and the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma. I once was seated with the Dalai Lama at a lunch in Washington. He didn’t say anything particularly illuminating or profound during the lunch, but every once in a while he just burst out laughing for no apparent reason. He would laugh, and I wanted to be polite, so I would laugh, too. He laughed. I laughed. He is just a joyful man. Ebullience is his resting state.
This kind of moral joy can start out as a surge of what the social psychologists call “moral elevation.” For example, a researcher working for the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt interviewed a woman who volunteered at the Salvation Army one winter’s morning with a few other people from her church. One of the other volunteers offered to give a bunch of them a ride home. It had been snowing solidly that morning. As they were driving through a residential neighborhood they saw an older lady standing in her driveway with a snow shovel. At the next intersection one of the guys in the backseat asked to be dropped off there. They let him out of the car, figuring he was close to home.
But instead of going into some nearby house, he walked up to the lady, took her shovel, and started shoveling her driveway. One of the women in the car witnessed this and recalled, “I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running, or skipping and laughing. Just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people. Writing a beautiful poem or love song. Playing in the snow like a child. Telling everybody about his deed….My spirit was lifted even higher than it already was. I was joyous, happy, smiling, energized. I went home and gushed to my suite-mates, who clutched at their hearts.” As Haidt notes, powerful moments of moral elevation seem to push a mental reset button, wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and moral inspiration. These moments of elevation are energizing. People feel strongly motivated to do something good themselves, to act, to dare, to sacrifice, to help others.
When people make generosity part of their daily routine, they refashion who they are. The interesting thing about your personality, your essence, is that it is not more or less permanent like your leg bone. Your essence is changeable, like your mind. Every action you take, every thought you have, changes you,