On Joy

After a long absence, I have decided to again use this site to supplement the reading and issues we discuss at our Sunday morning gathering.
We are examining Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis' Apostolic Exhortation of November 2013, and joy is a major theme.

What follows is a homily by James Casciotti S.J. on joy.

    

Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.

Lion BIoy

I should title this homily, "Reflections of a Melancholic," because l for one do not bear up well under joy. Recollected, somber emotions seem somehow more remand better suited to long-term use.
Yet, the Liturgy of the Church insists that joy is at least as much a part of being a Christian as sorrow. We celebrate, not seven Sundays after Easter, but seven Sundays of Easter; indeed, every Sunday is supposed to be a "little Easter."
The Easter Prefaces pound home the message: "the joy of the resurrection renews the whole world." It does? St. Augustine tells us that "We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song." Sis Boom Ba. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.
Today we will reflect on what Christian joy means and requires -and why many of us are uneasy with it. One reason we reluctant cheerleaders find it hard to be caught up in joy for very long is that we live in an aggressively secular, news-bite culture which gives us little help with sustained communal celebration.

Advent is filled with shopping and socializing. Christmas is over on the 25th. Holy Days long ago became holidays, the celebration of which has lost an} connection with religious belief or practice.
The very concept of celebration has been trivialized to a babe and a Bud from its original meaning: "to make significant." We celebrate with play. Play is like work in that it involves effort and skill and follows certain conventions -like ballroom dancing or golf or putting on a good dinner or a High Mass.
Unlike at least some work, play is something you want to master. something you like to do. Increasingly, we are forgetting how to play, choosing instead to loaf, to passively expect to be entertained.
Celebration requires relaxed but active reflection. a sense of leisure. of being at ease. Celebration requires savoring our time at play, savoring the presence of God in word and sacrament and in the people you care about and who care about you.
Joy is also a difficult attitude to form because it has been too often misused to deny pain or to manipulate others into not bothering us with their troubles.

Who among us has not tried to confide in a friend only to find ourselves being bludgeoned by joy and lectured on our negative, misguided feelings, on the dangers of self-fulfilling prophesies, etc.? While such advice may be well intentioned, it may say more about the unwillingness of the dispenser to share in the burdens of others.

Like most advertising, the shallow theology of joy foisted upon us by some liturgists, especially at funerals, promises more than it can deliver and invites us to ignore or repress suffering rather than face and work through it. As Simon Tugwell, a Dominican, comments:

Is it not all too probable that the insistence on Christian "Joy" is, to a considerable extent, only a pious version of the social pressure on us not to be weak or ailing? And if this is so, the rule of cheerfulness is but another instance of the way in which fallen humanity disowns its true emotions, and allows only selected, programmed, surrogate feelings to emerge into its consciousness.. .Those searing and humiliating moments when we are too distressed to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of our unsympathetic world, when even the Church tends to confront us with its wooden-faced puritanism of "joy," these are the very times upon which the Lord pronounces his Benediction.2

Another reason that joy is hard for us is that it is often comes mixed with envy and the fear of abandonment. It takes a secure friend to really rejoice when something great happens to you or you achieve something.

Even in a group of Jesuits, if one is highly praised, the others will either become quiet or begin to nod and make clucking sounds of agreement while deftly changing the topic as soon as possible.

Misery loves company, but when you get engaged or promoted, when you get your life together, will there still be room in it for me? Will I be left alone again when you don't need a shoulder to cry on? Or will I find you "boring" or "narcissistic" when you don't need to depend on me like before?

If you have been hurt or disappointed or betrayed in the past, the onset of joy or hope soon fills you with foreboding, anticipating the fresh pain sure to follow. As Violetta says in Traviata when her lover's disapproving father catches up with her, "I have been expecting you. I have been too happy."

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The empty cross, the empty grave. Great Jesus, you've risen from the dead, you're all finished with suffering. But what about us? We're still here; the marriage, the bills, the kids, AIDS and divorce and homophobia and abortion and watching those we love die. You on the cross, we can relate to!

Indeed, for most of us, growing in faith happens more in tough times than happy ones. One of the few things I say to God when I pray is, "You alone 0 Lord!" I always catch myself saying it sincerely at the moment.

However, I know that as soon as things are going well, I will become distracted at prayer, irritated with the foibles of others, and increasingly unfocused until things get bad enough for a new spurt of piety.

The fact is, that for a fickle human like myself, being too happy is a bit of a temptation. I think of the wonderful prayer from compline with which the Episcopal Church ends the day:

Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity he afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake.

Our Lord and I understand one another, just because I am fickle doesn't mean I don't love him. He knows he has to shield me when things are going well. This is from "Torch Song Trilogy." The protagonist is a female impersonator:

I'm strictly torch. While all the other kids were listening to the Beatles, San the Sham and the Dave Clark Five, I was home lipsynching Billie Holiday, Jane Froman, and Helen Morgan. As I got older I switched to Lucia Di Lammermoor, Tosca, and Manon. But is was always tragic stuff. Something about taking all that misery and making it into something.. .Anyway, the audiences like it. I guess getting hurt is the one thing we all have in common.3

Let's go back to the gospel now and see what we can learn about how better endure joy. The Risen Lord has not disappeared from us, not sloughed off and transcended his human existence. He has not gone back to heaven like a tired commuter to put his feet up and smoke a pipe.

In this extraordinary encounter, Jesus is still with us-not a resuscitated corpse, but not a ghost, in a transformed body-the body we will one day have. All that happened to him in the body and therefore all we experience in ours -suffering, frailty, loneliness, physical and mental handicap, even the evil done to us or by us-is finally not wasted, finally not a cruel trick.

All will be transformed by a Lover, whose sheer energy and passion we only begin to imagine.

Moreover, we recognize Jesus when he says, "You got anything here to eat?" Boy could Jesus pack it away. So many other times in Luke's gospel we've seen Jesus at table, at play, enjoying food, enjoying people and conversation.

Real Christian joy is anchored in these memories and living experiences of being here at table with Jesus and our ability to sustain it in our lives depends on our willingness to truly celebrate the Sacred Mysteries of faith and friendship and family-at other tables.

We recognize Jesus in the Breaking of the Bread. That Jesus is risen means that the boundaries of other bodies don't matter any more. Gentile or Jew, slave or free, woman or man-no more.

Indeed we become more ourselves by being vulnerable and open to others entering our lives, by identifing ourselves with others beyond boundaries of sex, age, race, culture, preference.

Jesus is still and ever being broken and shared and given to us. He enters us and we are in him. We are the Body of Christ. Because Jesus is risen, he is, in a new and intimate way, still suffering in and with us in our illnesses and anguishes, in our weaknesses and betrayals-still dying in our dying.

Paul says that we are make up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ and that Christ's death; that is, Christ's self-emptying, transforming love is at work in him. True joy is not the opposite of suffering, nor its denial, nor its absence.

Even now, suffering born with hope and dignity has the power to purify, strengthen, transform those both those who suffer and those who dare to share their burden.

We have all been attracted to people whose lives are seen to be difficult and yet who approach life with humor and joy. Some work with the poor and the dying. Some are terminally ill themselves. The lives of others would give them every excuse for bitterness, yet they are not. As Beverly Sills said:

I'm not happy, I'm cheerful. There's a difference. a happy woman has no cares at all. A cheerful woman had cares but has learned how to deal with them.4

Paul Tillich put it more theologically:

Joy has something within itself that is beyond joy and sorrow. This something is called blessedness.. .It makes the joy of life possible in pleasure and pain, in happiness and unhappiness, in ecstasy and sorrow. Where there is joy there is fulfillment. And where there is fulfillment, there is joy.5

Recognizing the Lord present within and among us in the breaking of the bread is opens our minds and hearts to understand the necessity of Jesus' sacrifice and strengthens us to find meaning in the suffering we experience in our attempts to love and be loved, to forgive and be forgiven.

In the life of every disciple struggle and joy go together. The joy of belonging, of companionship, the joy of recognizing him in others, the joy of discovered purpose comes only at the cost of giving yourself away, of allowing yourself to be broken and shared.

No wonder the arrival of the Risen Lord caused joy heavily mixed with, as the Gospel said, "disbelief and wonder." Christian joy is really a form of asceticism, a form of play-it is something you choose to become good at because you want to. Fr. Pelton, a priest from Madonna House in Canada writes:

If I look at the face of a man or woman who takes the Gospel seriously, what do I see? I see someone who experiences keenly his or her own weakness, who carries more than the average share of the world's pain, who hears clearly the cries of anguish rising on all sides. But I also see someone radically committed to the asceticism of joy, to letting go, in faith, of his or her own darkness so that the Risen Christ can shed the light of his new creation into and through the heart that God has made his home. This decision is the great vehicle of love, which is the work and play of the new creation, because it hands over to the Lord of glory all that is still inglorious that he may make it as radiant as he is.6

The Easter Bunny is for one day only. The joy of the Risen Lord is for every day of our journey. Come, let us celebrate the Sacred Mystery of the Lord. Dead. Risen. Broken and shared.

Let us know him in the Breaking of the Bread.

Let us know him in and beyond joy, in and beyond sorrow. Let us know him in ourselves and in one another.

Shield us, 0 Lord-for we are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.

1 Ouotations for the Christian World. ed. Edythe Draper. Wheaton, III: Tyndale House, 1992. 6548.

2The Beatitudes: Soundinqs in Christian Traditions. Templegate, 1980. p. 60.

3Harvey Fierstein. NY: The Gay Presses of NY, 1979. p. 97.

4Pearls of Wisdom. eds. Jerome Age! & Walter D. Glaze. NY: Harper, 1987. p. 45

SQCW. 6536.

6Robert D. Pelton. Circlinq the Sun: Meditations on Christ in Liturgy and Time. Washington: The Pastoral Press, 1986. p. 96.