I don't know whether there were far more birds than normal or whether I simply was in a bird-noticing mood as I walked out to the store by the path past the pine grove. I'm not a birder, but I like birds. They make life a little richer, a little happier. We share a world amicably enough, but in general I probably pay them about as much attention as they pay me, which is not much.

But for some reason, that morning, my walk seemed remarkably be-birded. I don't know a thing about bird-names, but a whole bunch of little guys (finches or sparrows, maybe?) seemed almost to be flirting with me. They'd light in the road chirping, take off as soon as I got within a certain distance, swirl up and circle around, fly a little way, alight, chirp, dart off, settle down... It felt more like a game than anything else.

An obviously paired pair (mourning doves, maybe? mates or competitors or just friends?) were whooping it up through the pine grove, easily dodging the trees as they chased each other. Blue jays I can definitely recognize, and I saw one, a flash of bright boldness, as well as one definite goldfinch (impossible to miss!) I saw a solemn heron flying, its legs trailing out behind it and its big wings slowly beating the air. But I cannot for the life of me tell you the name of the handsome grey jobbie with the black-and-white trim who was picking bugs out of a pine tree's bark. I'm sure a birder would know, but I didn't have a clue.

It would be anthropomorphizing to say that the birds were happy. I thought as I watched them how unutterably foreign their experience is to mine--how little I could possibly ever understand how it feels to be a bird. Birds don't, in fact, go where they will; they have boundaries both territorial and behavioural; they are constricted by instinct. I suppose in one sense, we're freer than they are--or at least those of us who live in freedom are.

Birds may respect their own boundaries, but they have no use for the lines we draw on the earth or for the walls we build. They have their own imperatives instead. (Some years ago, a peregrine falcon built its nest on a ledge of an Ottawa skyscraper and used to startle the bureaucrats and businesspeople by dive-bombing for pigeons, a fact I found obscurely cheering.) And because we can't fly, birds represent something to humans: a lightness of being, freedom, play, and also perhaps courage and boldness. Maybe that's why we use the symbol of a dove for the Holy Spirit, to try to picture that freedom: "The wind blows where it will and cannot be stopped."

I thought, watching the cloud of little guys lift and swirl away, how joyous they made me feel, and I remembered a line from W.H. Auden--I don't know where I read it. He said, "One's duty to God is to be happy."

It's not always a duty we can carry out. I thought of a recent tragedy--a young man killed in a freak accident on a fairway ride in Ottawa. It would be insulting his parents to suggest that they have a duty to God to be happy. Their job, right now, is to mourn for a necessary season, and to skimp that process would be wrong. Telling people to be joyful under supremely unjoyful conditions, like grief or real oppression or physical pain or illness, may be really saying only, "Live with it. I don't want to deal with your problems. I don't want to suffer with you. You're making me uncomfortable, and I don't want to be uncomfortable." Reality-denial is neither sweet nor wholesome. And telling people in "sorrow, trouble, need, sickness" to rejoice can, instead of comforting them, be deeply maddening to anyone whose brain has not been turned off at source. Maybe there's Joy to be found even in those circumstances, but that's for the sufferer to discover for him- or herself--as Job did when the Lord told him to get his nose out of his navel and look around at Creation --not for others to get all condescending about.

But when joy is reasonably possible, or even maybe a little bit before that, I think it is indeed what we owe God--not so much to feel joy as to experience Joy. "Oh be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands," as the psalmist said: a reasonable instruction. If that doesn't seem possible, it may be because we're confusing Joy and happiness, which are very different things. Happiness, or satisfaction or pleasure, are our own internal reactions. But Joy isn't ours; it's God's, and God is trying to get us to notice it. Joy lies outside ourselves, waiting for us to tumble into it.

Joy lurks--in a bunch of small birds, in the shadows of a green bush, in the turn of a child's wrist or the curve of a man's shoulder, in almost any given flower. It can hit you like a ton of bricks when you're just standing there at the kitchen counter getting supper. It may waylay you on the highway or seduce you while you're talking to a friend or jump you in the supermarket for no reason at all. You just have to allow that it may be possible, and let it make you happy.

We can ignore Joy, because we're so wrapped up in our own self-chosen miseries, cherishing this grievance or that grief and therefore resolutely refusing to accept Joy's existence. Or we may fall in love with the Byronic Rrrrromantic Misery of Things--the misery-part usually stemming from the fact that Life has, most unfairly, failed to conserve our childhood certainty that we are at the centre of the known universe.

But if we lift up our eyes and look around, Joy's out there, wanting to be found; it wants to infect us, if we're willing to lay ourselves open to it, even a little.

It's waiting out there with the birds. Go look for it.