One of my favorite editorial page moments ever came recently when the Globe ran a typically scathing anti-Bush editorial, only to be greeted with several letters outraged that the editorial writer hadn’t eviscerated Bush still more. We, my friends, live in the Land of the Perpetually Outraged. I associate our city with the “If you aren’t completely appalled, you haven’t been paying attention” bumper sticker, and that is so me. I face the invitation to outrage hourly. Every newspaper, every conversation, every traffic encounter fuels that flame.

And yet I’m in a line of work where people find their way to me looking for a happier life, all of whom face a tension. On the one hand, we do in fact care about all those things that outrage us. We can’t seem to drop the idea of a world that’s better than the one currently being ruined by all the idiots out there. (Okay, I’m ranting. I got sucked back in!) On the other hand, we have the suspicion that perpetual outrage and overflowing joy can’t coexist and, forced to choose, we’d prefer the second (if perhaps with a sneaking suspicion that we were selling out). So we feel stuck.

Our church has some international partnerships, and one of those is in Lebanon. I was sitting in on a gripping gathering in Beirut a few years back that I think of at these moments. It was made up primarily of students at the American University there who had the chance to hear from a visiting Norwegian Member of Parliament. The Norwegians seem to take it as a personal challenge to mediate every international conflict, and this MP had been in the middle of many of the most intense conflicts of the last couple of decades. He’d come to this fresh off of personal meetings with Sharon and Arafat (so this was a few years ago) and had lots of thoughtful and hopeful things to say on that front, even as he told us astounding stories from Sri Lanka and the Balkans. When the time came for questions, the first came from a handsome, stylishly-dressed young man, who said something to this effect: “I will never stop fighting for justice for the Palestinians until my dying breath! I will drive across the border today loaded down with dynamite if that’s what it takes!” And he sat down.

My friend who’d put the meeting together and who, at the time, helped coordinate a major outreach to folks in the Palestinian refugee camp on the south side of town, said: “Well, you know, if you want to help an actual Palestinian, I could put you to work this afternoon. Give me an hour, give me an afternoon, give me your life, whatever you want.” Of course that went nowhere. In debriefing the time, my friend said that outrage was like breathing in his circles, but any real regard for the objects of peoples’ outrage was far more rare. And he pointed out to me that the impressive Norwegian mediator, a man actually, effectively working for justice, was obviously full of joy and outrage-free.

It seems to me that we truly are created for that thing we suspect we most want: joy. And that joy offers us the prospect of not being paralyzed in—perhaps?—the sham pleasure of knowing who our enemies are. And that joy is what empowers us to start moving out in actual acts of justice. And that, when I do that, I find my outrage sliding off of me like icing on a cake just out of the oven. I find myself praying for my perceived enemies, praying that the injustice of the moment will not stand. And I find myself glad to be living the day I’m in.

So my note to myself today is something like: Find joy now. High priority. Don’t forget it in the middle of answering your email. If you let this slide, that’s another day of your life you’ll never get back.