More Us, More Joy

A Reflection on the First Reading for Sunday, March 30, 2025:
Fourth Sunday of Lent

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Joshua
5:9a, 10-12

The Lord said to Joshua, “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.”

While the children of Israel were camped in Gilgal they kept the Passover in the evening on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho.

On the day after the Passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the children of Israel no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

I am reading a book about joy. In fact, it is called The Book of Joy, and it is based on a series of joint interviews with Bishop Desmond Tutu (a South African prelate of the Church of England, who stepped into the political arena in the late 1980s to speak against his country’s official discrimination policy) and his very good friend, the Dalai Lama (who, as the political leader of Tibet, was deposed and forced to flee his country when the Communist Party took control of the government and who continues as the spiritual leader of the world’s Tibetan Buddhists from his place of exile in India).


Over and again, Bishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama speak about connectedness, how every person has something in common with another, how everything we can suffer has been and is being suffered by another person, perhaps by many people. When we appreciate how we are alike, we begin have compassion, even love, for others. This, they say, is the key to finding joy: accepting the invitation to meet others with love and impugning egocentrism, which steals our joy. 

These interviews pick up the thread of the much older story we read about in the First Reading for this Sunday. Here we meet Joshua, the Israelite who succeeded Moses in leading his nation out of slavery in Egypt and, after 40 years of wandering in the desert, into the Promised Land where they shed the “disgrace” of disobedience to the will of the Lord and embraced gratitude for the Lord’s favour for the Chosen People.
 
We all yearn for the Promised Land of joy—all peoples and religions of the world seem to share this fundamental search for happiness—but how do we get there and dwell there? This is the way the Dalai Lama, Bishop Tutu, and Joshua advocate: by remaining mindful of our connection to others, whether as a person united to all people (as Buddhists believe), as one of the beloved Children of God (as the Israelites believed), or ultimately, as one in the One Lord Jesus (as Christians believe).

I regret that, although this answer is simple, the practice is not an easy one. Beginning a new kind of life, as the Israelites did, is no easy task. There is a hard road leading to the promised land of joy and plenty of temptations in this world to pull us away from it — grumbling, grousing, comparing ourselves to others and nursing bitterness about their good fortune.

I have done all these things but, this Lent, I intend to fast from preoccupation with myself in favour of greater compassion for others — less grousing and more gratitude, less judging and more joy, less me and more us.




Donna Davis

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