Weekly Meditation – December 15, 2025

by Dr. Alan Akana

The Holiday Meditation this week is provided by Alan Akana. Rev. Dr. Alan Akana is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and has served churches in California, Hawaii, Montana, Utah, and Texas. He is currently Kahu of Kōloa Union Church on Kaua`i. He has also worked in the areas of stewardship and fundraising for religious not-for-profit organizations. He is also a 
published author and an accomplished watercolorist with a focus on the indigenous flowers of Hawai`i.

Thoughts About Joy

Aloha, I am Alan Akana, the Kahu at Kōloa Union Church on Kaua`i, and I’ve been asked to share a few thoughts about joy.

Early this fall I came across an article that CNN put on their online “Health” page, and the article addressed why people sometimes have trouble experiencing joy. It caught my attention because I have been doing some writing on the topic over the past few years, and it confirmed something which I have believed for quite awhile. The article shared the thoughts of Dr. Judith Joseph, a board-certified psychiatrist and researcher who has made it her mission to study joy. She says “joy isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s a part of who we are.” Dr. Joseph goes on to say, “We are built with that DNA for joy. It’s our birthright as human beings.”

When you look into a newborn’s eyes and make a connection, face-to-face, that baby will look at you with a sense of wonder; if that baby likes what it sees in you, a heartwarming smile will follow—unbridled joy! That baby doesn’t care about your gender, sexual orientation, skin color, political preferences, or religion. When people connect with others in person and without judgment, we feel joy. It’s just how we are built. “We are built with that DNA for joy.”

I think that Jesus understood this when he invited a small child to be present in the midst of his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” I like to think of the “kingdom of heaven” as “heaven on earth.” I am confident that Jesus wanted people to have the same sense of joy and wonder that babies and young children have when they encounter others. Wouldn’t this indeed be heaven on earth?

However, we tend to lose that sense as we get older and learn to separate people into groups and then place labels on them, especially the labels “us” and “them.” Rather than looking at people through the eyes of wonder, we look through the lens of judgment, which nearly always leads to less joy for both. As we get older, we tend to look at people in this way, and that is a key reason why we sometimes feel less joy as we age.

There is a lot in our culture that encourages us to move away from wonder and towards judgment. Our communities of faith often show us how to separate and label people in our minds: those who are chosen and those who are not; those who understand God best and those who understand God very little (if at all!); those who are forgiven and those who are not; those going to heaven and those going to hell. Our communities of culture (based on citizenship, ethnicity or tribal affiliation) do the same kinds of separating and labeling: those who matter more and those who matter less; those who are more civilized and those who are less so; those with a more worthy history and those with a history of little importance; those whose stories that are meaningful and those whose stories have very little meaning. Finally, I don’t think anyone will be surprised by the statement that our politics do the same type of separating and labeling: those who honor our forebears and those who do not; those who understand our government and those who have little or no understanding; those whose morals guide their understanding of politics and those who have little or no ethical standards applied to politics.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can all approach the strangers in our midst with wonder and joy; and we can teach our children, our students, and our congregants to do the same. May we be committed to doing so.