Miroslav Volf on joy as something formative/interpretive, hopeful/collaborative, and fragmentary/proleptic:
Joy involves the construal of the object of joy as good; it is tied to how I perceive things rather than to what things are in themselves. …
Related as it is to intentional objects, joy depends both on the more objective character of things and on my subjective construal of them. If I find a desirable item on my table and construe it as a gift, I will rejoice; if I construe it as a bribe, I will become disturbed. On the one hand, joy is not entirely self-generated; because it has an object and is a response, it comes partly from outside, from the character of the world I encounter. On the other hand, I can rob myself of joy by failing to perceive good things as good things and to respond to them properly.
With its four structural elements (intentional object, perception of the object as good, experience of the object as un-owed and a positive hedonic response), we can define joy as emotional attunement between the self and the world – usually a small portion of it – experienced as blessing.
What kind of future does joy want? As it projects itself into the future, joy doesn’t aim directly at changing the world; it simply delights in and celebrates the good that is and proclaims, implicitly, that it is good for that good to continue to be. “All joy wants eternity – wants deep, deep eternity,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. Like love, joy is one of the “eternity seeking” emotions. It wills itself as a permanent state. But just for that reason it also wills all the “objects” which give it rise. In this willing joy sets itself tacitly against features of the world over which one cannot or should not rejoice, and does so without resentment and judgment. As such, joy is both the beginning and the end of authentic personal, social, and political transformation.
Joy is best experienced in community. Joy seeks company (“come and rejoice with me”) and the company of those who rejoice feeds the joy of each. Feasts and celebrations both express and nourish joy. As feasts and celebrations illustrate, though joy is irreducibly personal – nobody can rejoice in my place – joyfulness can also be an aura of a social space, whether a household or a larger community, so that when we enter such a space, we enter into joy, and, often, joy enters into us.
For the most part, segments of our life – often entire chunks of it – aren’t going well and much of it we don’t live well. Given that joy attaches to life going well and being led well, must joy be lost to us? It need not be. We can rejoice over the many small goods we experience, and for those of us who are religious, we can find joy in the One Good that is both the source and the goal of our existence.
Though fragmentary, all small joys celebrate goods in our lives that are and remain wonderful, at times no more than tender plants in the cracks of our otherwise heavily cemented and gray lives. And in all true joys we yearn for, and perhaps also faintly experience, a world in which all things and all manner of things shall be well.