Advent Week 3 | Finding Joy You Can Trust

Part 3 of a 4-week Advent series released every Sunday

Joy is everywhere in the culture — sold, studied, optimized, hashtagged — and yet so many people feel flat, numb, or quietly exhausted instead of joyful. If you’ve ever wondered why joy feels harder to trust than it should, this episode is for you.

Welcome to the third week of Advent on the Holy Rebels Podcast, where we make space for grounded spiritual practices, nervous system awareness, and the deep wisdom of the Christian mystical tradition.

This week is all about Joy.
Not forced positivity.
But a joy you can trust — the kind that doesn’t disappear when life gets hard.

Nina Hirlaender OFS brings together Franciscan spirituality, psychology, and neuroscience to explore why modern culture struggles with joy, and why Advent offers a radically different invitation. This is Gaudete Sunday — the moment when the tradition calls us to rejoice in the middle of waiting, not after everything is resolved. 

What you’ll take away from this episode:

• why joy is not the same thing as happiness, and why chasing happiness often backfires 
• how loneliness, exhaustion, and pressure to “be happy” block our capacity for joy
• what psychology and neuroscience reveal about joy as a body-based, relational state
• the meaning of Gaudete Sunday and why joy appears in the middle of Advent
• the five most common obstacles to joy
• a simple Advent candle practice to help joy arrive gently, without forcing

Joy is the felt experience of connection — to love, to meaning, to God, to your own deepest self. It can coexist with grief, uncertainty, fatigue, and unfinished stories.

Advent doesn’t ask you to pretend you feel joyful. It invites you to discover a joy that can live inside what is unresolved.

Press play to enter Week Three of Advent with more honesty, more spaciousness, and a deeper trust in the quiet joy that is already arriving.