Variety: Nehemiah 8v10

The Joy of the Lord is your strength (Nehemiah 8v10)

The spiritual journey is a constant interplay between moments of awe followed by a general process of surrender to that moment. We must first allow ourselves to be captured by the goodness, truth, or beauty of something beyond and outside ourselves. Then we universalize from that moment to the goodness, truth, and beauty of the rest of reality, until our realization eventually ricochets back to include ourselves! Yet we humans resist both the awe and, even more, the surrender. The ego resists the awe while the will resists the surrender. But both together are vital and necessary. 
It is in this place of prayerful surrender that joy unspeakable erupts.  
This joy beckons us not as individual monastics but as a community. 
It is a joy that lives as comfortably in the shout as it does in silence. 
It is expressed in the diversity of personal spiritual disciplines and liturgical rituals. 
This joy is our strength, and we need strength because we are well into the twenty-first century, and we are not healed.

Richard Rohr