3 Joy, attention, and Human Flourishing
We can see another crucial aspect of the connection between joy and human flourishing through Iris Murdoch’s concept of attention. In this respect, Murdoch writes in The Sovereignty of Good that attention is '[…] a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality […] the proper mark of the active moral agent. ' Commenting this passage, Sarah McDonough writes, '[…] Iris Murdoch challenges the reader to link the moral life with an ideal of moral vision. In her view, how we act in the world mirrors what we see. ' Concerning the same point, Murdoch also writes that 'I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of "see" which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort. ' With reference to the Bible 's passages I am considering, to pay attention is to see the individual reality which is God and
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Thus, we can understand clear vision as what we achieve by clearly envisioning God surrounded by the joyful assembly, and the fruit of the Spirit as resulting from our absorbtion of this vision in our daily life. In other words, we are called to exercise our moral imagination to see our existence in the light of our calling to worship God in joy. In this respect, pictures as the one of Hebrews 12 feed our moral imagination, by providing visions of scenes paying attention to which we become moral agents and flourish as human beings – that is, they set us on the path of exercizing the virtues. Once again, from what that I have just said it follows that the joy Paul writes about is not a generic expression of this emotion. Instead, the joy which is the fruit of the Holy Spirit in us is a theologically connotated joy, which flows from contemplating God