As we learn to give thanks for all of life and death, for all of this given world of ours, we find a deep joy. It is the joy of trust, the joy of faith in the faithfulness at the heart of all things. It is the joy of gratefulness in touch with the fullness of life.

Trust your happiness and the richness of your life at this moment. It is as true and as much yours as anything else that ever happened to you.

When we wholeheartedly trust that life is always working in our favour, we can trust that the right people will always show up in our lives.

Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.

I wish you joy. To spend life's fleeting days mid joy that never meets an evil hour is to be blessed beyond compare.

Joy is strength.

When you wish someone joy, you wish them peace, love, prosperity, happiness... all the good things.

Today I affirm the All-Good, and in this affirmation I accept the presence of love and repudiate every belief that hate has any power. I affirm peace and deny confusion. I affirm joy and declare that sadness has no place in my consciousness. I affirm that God is over all, in all, and through all. There is nothing in my past that can limit me or limit my future. There is One Life, that Life is God, that Life is the only life there is, and that Life is my life now.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

"Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to <i>all</i> woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, "You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!" then you wanted <i>all</i> back. All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored — oh then you <i>loved</i> the world. Eternal ones, love it eternally and evermore; and to woe too, you say: go, but return! <i>For all joy wants — eternity</i>."

I place trust in God, my creator, in all things; I love Him with all my heart.

Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don't have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice.

I can understand that. There is a moral attitude at work here. But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better - and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. Joy, then, does not break with solidarity. When it is the right kind of joy, when it is not egotistic, when it comes from the perception of the good, then it wants to communicate itself, and it gets passed on. In this connection, it always strikes me that in the poor neighborhoods of, say, South America, one sees many more laughing happy people than among us. Obviously, despite all their misery, they still have the perception of the good to which they cling and in which they can find encouragement and strength.

In this sense we have a new need for that primordial trust which ultimately only faith can give. That the world is basically good, that God is there and is good. That it is good to live and to be a human being. This results, then, in the courage to rejoice, which in turn becomes commitment to making sure that other people, too, can rejoice and receive good news.

I believe in trusting. Trust begets trust. Suspicion is foetid and only stinks. He who trusts has never yet lost in the world.

Laughter is eternity if joy is real.