With gratitude to William Sloane Coffin*:

There is in other words a difference between having a friend and being a friend, between having success and being successful, between getting an education and becoming learned.  If we use knowledge, music, art, sports, and eminently others – if we use them just to enrich ourselves, then paradoxically we impoverish ourselves, at least at our very core.  For all things then become as clothes: they cover but they do not touch or develop our inner being, and we become as those who believe they can only become visible when something visible covers the surface.

But if we give ourselves to art, music, sports, knowledge, and eminently to others, then we expeirence that biblical truth that “he who loses his life shall find it,” shall find life being fulfilled, and find that joy is self-fulfillment, self-fulfillment is joy.

For joy is to escape from the prison of selfhood and to enter by love into union with the life that dwells and sings within the essence of every other thing and in the core of our own souls.  Joy is to feel the doors of the self fly open into a wealth that is endless because none of it is ours and yet it all belongs to us. (122-123)

*William Sloane Coffin.  Credo.  Louisville: Wesminster John Knox Press, 2004.