There is this very deep spiritual belief, passed on for centuries by great religious thinkers: for a life to have meaning, it must be a life with joy.

When you do things from your soul, write Rumi, you feel a river moving in you, a joy. St. Augustine said a life without joy was a life without faith. “I have drunken deep of joy,” wrote Shelley, and I will taste no other wine tonight.”

St. Francis wrote that spiritual joy arises from the purity of the heart.

I relate to this idea of joy. Like most people, I have known joyless times and times with joy. It is, for me, in many ways the difference between life and death.

I think I’ve learned that joy is everywhere in the world, but it takes a conscious act of awakeness to see it, amidst all of the clutter and static and worry of our world.

The sixteenth century kabbalist Isaac Luria is regarded as a genius,  one of the great spiritual lights of the world. He attributed his great gifts one simple thing: he lived every day with joy.

The light revealed by any action is directly proportional to our joy in performing the act, seeing the sight, doing the good, seeing the world, said Luria.

In the absence of joy, said the prophets,  even the greatest acts of kindness and sharing are diminished. Thomas Merton agreed, he wrote that even the greatest acts of  kindness and faith are diminished if we are not happy in our lives and our spiritual work.

Love brings joy to me. So does appreciation. I felt joy after my open heart surgery, I knew I might otherwise be dead. I feel joy every time i love Maria. I feel joy walking in the woods with the dogs, every time the donkeys bray.

To my astonishment, I find joy in every small act of kindness I commit, in every crumpled $5 bill someone sends me from North Dakota.

“Lord,” prayed St. Francis, “where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light, where there is sadness. joy.”

I feel joy when I buy shoes for a Mansion resident, or shorts for a refugee soccer player, or I see a photograph of my granddaughter or daughter, or rub a donkeys nose or talk to a tree in the forest.

I feel joy when I take a photograph filled with emotion.

I feel joy in the powers of color and light that shape my photos, that I possess the tools in my fingers and mind that create, and the positive actions they allow me to perform.

I think for me joy is about how I see the world, the choices I make about hope and suffering. I think of joy as a sweet berry to be plucked from a bush full of thorns, a shining crystal in a sea of dirt and mud.

What Luria said. I seek to live every day with joy, that is a life of meaning.