Ode to Joy

Joy Cowley’s conversation is peppered with grace. She tells many stories—as a story teller should—and casually drops into conversation that ‘Terry and I have been listening to tapes on quantum physics’.

At 80 years old, Joy knits, spins, bakes, enjoys trips to the city, and equally, putting her ‘feet in the grass’ at home in the South Wairarapa. She has taken up woodturning, with two lathes kept the garage. In her lounge room is an ornate Kauri lamp, ‘Woody’—a type of Pinocchio figure, and bowls of native wood, all made by her hand. Joy is simply that. A joy.

The conversation almost immediately turns to what is her deepest, abiding love, her Christian spirituality. ‘All writing and prayer comes from a very deep place, so I don’t confuse writing and prayer. They go together,’ reflects Joy. ‘That deep place is our connection with God.’

She reflects on the world’s greatest story, beginning with the Genesis creation tale. ‘I used to worry about the serpent in the Garden of Eden,’ muses Joy. ‘But, even today, the serpent is a symbol of wisdom and healing in the Middle East. The Babylonians revered the serpent, so the serpent became a symbol of evil to the Jews, like the Nazi Swastika in World War II.’

Yet, in the grand story of Scripture, evil is fully redeemed. ‘There was Moses lifting up the serpent in the desert to bring healing, and Jesus compares himself to the serpent, saying, “So must the Son of Man be lifted up.” ’

Joy explains all this on her way to recounting a favourite story, first told to her by a Jewish Rabbi: ‘In the beginning, God created a huge clay vessel, and God breathed his fire of love into the vessel. And God’s love was so strong that it shattered the vessel into trillions of pieces and creation was born. So every one of us is a shard of clay with a spark of God in it. It’s our duty in this life to fan that spark into flame.’

The God spark

Joy’s relationship with God has always been with her, even before she had the words for it. ‘I used to say I had a twin sister who died, but watched over me. I knew this was made up, but it was a way of explaining the sense of guidance I felt in my life.’ Her parents were both people of faith in their own ways, but her father’s ill health and her mother’s bouts of mental illness skewed their perspectives. Joy was taught a fearsome and angry God. Yet, ‘to me, Jesus was the children’s friend,’ she recalls.

‘I used to go to the Presbyterian church in the morning and The Salvation Army in the afternoon. I was an explorer from an early age, and I really enjoyed that.’ At the age of nine, Joy dedicated her life to Jesus in her own private ceremony: ‘I took a broken plate, some newspaper, rose petals, my father’s matches, and went into the pine trees at the back of our house. I lit a small fire in the plate and sprinkled the rose petals on it. I made the commitment and there was no heavy feeling,’ she writes in her memoirs Navigation.

As a ‘young’ 19 year old, Joy discovered that she was three months pregnant, and instead of feeling the weight of ire, she was overjoyed. Under pressure from her boyfriend Ted’s mother, they married and went on to have four children together. But Ted then left Joy for another woman. They were bleak times.

One day, Ted took the children ... and didn’t bring them back. Joy was overwhelmed with sorrow so heavy she longed ‘for a deep sleep’. A trained pharmacist, she took twice the fatal dose of Soneryl butobarbitone and lay back on her bed. What transpired next was a mysterious, near-death experience.

‘I had a feeling of peace come over me, and all was dissolving, earth was dissolving and rushing past like a waterfall. What was behind it was light, an amazing light. That’s where I run out of words to describe it. It’s not like any definition of light that we know, it was this great, loving Presence enveloping me. In a second I was just filled with rapture, it was bliss. There was absolute knowledge, and I was going home. My last conscious thought was, “How could I have forgotten?”

‘I started falling back, like falling down a well, but I could still see the light and really wanted to go back to it. Then I heard voices around me and I was in hospital. I thought it had been about 20 seconds; it was three days.’

Joy woke up blind and paralysed—she compares this to Saul’s Damascus experience that left him blind with the revelation of God. ‘The depression disappeared, the physical effects, the headaches, and everything fell into place.’ She regained her sight and the use of her legs—despite complications that have lasted to this day—and most of all, she still treasures a close relationship with all of her four children.

The real Mrs Wishy-Washy

All this occurred just a year after Joy had her first novel published, Nest in a Falling Tree, and she was already becoming an acclaimed writer. Roald Dahl bought the film rights for her book, establishing a firm and lasting friendship between the authors. With the money she received, Joy was able to buy property in Fish Bay, on the Marlborough Sounds. In time, she turned this into a retreat, where many people bruised by life took solace—organisations such as Women’s Refuge sent Joy their clients, where prayer, silence and retreat became a healing balm.

But it is as a children’s novelist that Joy is best known and most loved. Anyone growing up in a New Zealand school from the ’60s onwards has read many a Joy Cowley story as part of their reading programme. Perhaps her best known novel is The Silent One, which took shape during a trip to Fiji, when Joy saw a turtle in deep distress being sold at the local markets. And her most loved character may be Mrs Wishy-Washy—you can’t help but feel that Joy is more at home with this delightful, bustling old woman than with the literati she has found herself part of.

But it was Joy’s work in early reading that really transformed the way we teach our children. Joy, herself, could easily have written herself off as a ‘bad reader’. She didn’t master reading until she was seven years old, finding the rote learning of words confusing.

Working in early learning and writing for The School Journal, Joy was frustrated that stories for young children were written without any concept of the language or ideas that were important to young readers. The words being taught came from a seemingly random list, compiled by adults, without any consultation. Joy and her co-conspirators revolutionised the way we learn, focusing on language that real children used, and setting their stories firmly within our Kiwi context. No more Janet and John.

It is impossible to measure the impact that having our own stories has had on the development of our cultural identity. But perhaps the fact that almost everyone knows the name ‘Joy Cowley’ is some small hint. She is New Zealand’s number one selling author by far—having sold at least 40 million books.

The spiritual life

In her adult life, God called Joy to the one church she had never considered—the Catholic church. She has become sought after as a retreat leader, where she helps people connect with God through their own life stories. ‘Our lives are full of mystery. How many of us have thought about a person, and then that moment the phone rings and it’s them. Or we’ve had a dream that comes true. Those are messages from the spiritual realm, and it’s all around us. That’s where true guidance comes from,’ she says.

‘God is beyond our limited sensate system—we know only what we can see, taste, touch, smell. But the spiritual realm is all around us.’

After her marriage to Ted broke up, Joy met and married Malcolm Mason. They had 14 contented years of marriage, and Joy nursed her husband at home as he was dying of cancer. A priest called Terry Coles visited every day, spending an hour or two with Malcolm.

After Malcolm passed away, Joy kept in touch with the priest. ‘One day on the phone he said, “B****r this, I want to get married!” And I waited for him to tell me who he had met. Then he said, “What do you think about that?” And I realised he meant me.’

After some protestation, she agreed. ‘Terry said, “You know there’ll be a fuss in the church”, and I said, “No, it won’t be too bad.” But it was. The other priests and bishops were wonderful, but it was the lay people—we got anonymous letters and friends avoided us. But the dust soon settled.’

Over the years, Joy has learnt that life’s hardest moments have been her greatest teachers. ‘Loss and grief have emptied me, and I’ve been filled with something greater and more expansive,’ she reflects. ‘There are no crucifixions without resurrection, and what is resurrected is always greater than had died.’

New stories

Although Joy says she has no plans to keep writing beyond her current projects, stories still ‘just come’ to her. Joy gives a sneak peak of a new character she has created for three year olds called Freddy Bear: ‘Freddy goes to the potty really well most of the time, but sometimes it’s, “Oops” and his mother brings him dry pants. He goes to the beach with Daddy and is having such a lovely time. Dad carries him on his shoulders, and Freddy goes “Oops” on daddy’s back. Not only does Freddy need new pants, but Dad needs a new shirt.’ You can hear the echoes of laughter in New Zealand pre-schools already.

With age has come lightness, reflects Joy: ‘I feel younger now than I did when I was 10 or 11. I felt ancient when I was a child, because life was hard. But I have become simpler and more childlike. I think it’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Come as little children.” ’

She tells one last story: ‘When we are young, a tree is simply a tree. Then we see it’s made of wood and leaves and branches. Then we go further and we see it’s made of cellular tissue and a cambium layer, and we study photosynthesis. Finally, it all comes together again, and a tree is simply a tree. But this time we know what it is to be a tree. That is the spiritual journey.’

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by Ingrid Barratt (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 23 January 2016, pp 5-7.
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