The Guilt of Joy & The Grace of Silliness

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” -Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

When I was twenty-two, on a chilly October night, I sat with a margarita in one hand and an existential crisis in the other. One of my best friends sat in a distant haze and met my eyes with a hint of quiet, confused sadness. I asked if he was okay.

“I’m just having a bad night,” he muttered.When I asked him why, he unexpectedly spiraled into a heated monologue about global issues and displacement of the poor due to violence or climate issues and collateral damage in the Middle East. I didn’t know how to respond because my biggest issue to think about that night was simply whether or not I was going to talk to the cute guy by the stage. (I didn’t.)

But alas, he sat stewing in anguish over the disturbing reality of our world and his particular, present position in a place where he was safe from it all, but guilty of feeling any sort of joy when he felt he didn’t deserve to.

What I always admired about him was his invaluable sense of the need to change the world around him - to make the world a better place. He had the capacity of a political think tank, and he ruminated over social issues way more than any twenty-two year old should, concerned with global conflict, knee-deep in political issues over eighty percent of the time, and it consumed him entirely. He was paralyzed by analysis.

“It’s not like I can take my eyes off of it,” he said. “How can you ignore it all when the world is literally on fire?”

“Well, do you have any control over any of it?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “But it’s kind of my moral responsibility to worry, right? What right do I have to be happy when the world is full of violence and injustice both here and across the world? There are people down the street starving or addicted to drugs, and this is how I’m spending my Tuesday night?”

I wasn’t entirely sure what to say, one, because he was totally killing my vibe, and I just wanted to dance, and two, because I didn’t exactly know either. It wasn’t exactly something I thought about all the time. Did we have the right to be enjoying ourselves here at a meaningless Halloween party? When so many bad things are happening all around us, can we rightfully be happy at all? Is that like rubbing our happiness in other people’s faces? Like we’d offend them? Shouldn’t we be prioritizing our time to helping others as much as we can? If I’m so lucky to be sitting here on a Tuesday night, surrounded by friends and music and excitement, then shouldn’t I also have the moral obligation to do something about those who don’t? It’s not a simple question, so there’s not a simple answer.

First off, joy and happiness, at least in the Christian sense of the terms, are not completely the same. Happiness is a sense of glee, usually from one particular event or stimulus. Joy, on the other hand, is rather a “deep peace which comes from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within a person, and lasts despite hardship” (catholicexchange.com). Happiness is getting what you want. Joy is being happy even when you don’t.

Peter Seewald asked Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in a 1997 interview if in a world of such disproportionate justice if it is becoming increasingly hard for people to be happy.

Ratzinger replies that he has noticed “unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens... When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don’t have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice” (Ratzinger 36).

He says this attitude is admirable for its concern for the other, and the sense of moral solidarity, but this perspective is still wrong. Refusing joy doesn’t make the world any better, on the contrary, it does nothing to help it. He says the world needs people who do find joy and thus find the courage to be good. In this search for justice and solidarity, he sees that no matter what, “the good in man cannot be crushed.”

Sit on that for a second. In a world where so many things go wrong, we always try to make it better. We are built for joy. We are made for change. And we are designed for good. For good. Sometimes that takes on different forms for different people. But this remains unchanged: We don’t want to see the world burn.

With this static sense of dread, we sometimes feel bogged down by the immense animosity we see in our world. But as Catholics, are we supposed to sit in sadness about it? Are we called to stew and ruminate in this dread, wondering why the world is the way it is?

Of course not! “It is not fitting,” Saint Francis said, “when one is in God’s service, to have a gloomy face or a chilling look.” Even Teresa of Avila pleads, “God save us from gloomy saints!”

It’s in the uncompromising joy that we develop this outward sense of relationship, where we lose that self-consciousness and live outwardly and joyfully to cultivate relationships with our brothers and sisters. To find joy in another’s joy.

To be unapologetically joyful is paramount to being a Christian. But being joyful doesn’t necessarily mean being happy. Being joyful is taking the bad parts of life with a smile and a grateful heart. It doesn’t mean we lie and say “Yeah everything is great!” while we feel our life is falling apart. Rather, it’s softly smiling through the pain and saying, “Yeah things are tough, but God is tougher.” Joy isn’t pretending to be happy when you’re not for the sake of being a smiley Christian. It’s accepting the pain as something to change you and to make you holy.

We don’t lie and say everything is cheery all the time. If it was, we wouldn’t grow. But stewing in our suffering or refusing to feel joy because someone else may be unhappy - that is not the Christian thing to do.

“These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” John 15:11

To have this unembarrassed joy is to reflect the spirit of God, which is love. Love is not sitting and sulking. Love is embracing joy and hope and comforting those who need comforting. Joy is the spring from which love comes forth. If we have no joy within us, we are less likely to love. And when we are less likely to love, we aren’t doing God’s work.

Think about it, how likely are you to want to go out of your way to help someone if you’re all gloom and doom? Not very likely. You’d probably rather be curled up on your couch with a bowl of mac-n-cheese watching Shrek. You don’t want to help people out when you’re sad. Because when you’re sad, your priority is your own needs and desires. We turn inward and focus on ourselves, becoming even more self-absorbed, which is exactly the opposite of what the Spirit does for us!

Galatians 5:22 says, “...the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness.” We embody the fruit of the Spirit. We don’t do that by ruminating on how horrible everything is. We become the light. We become the change. We become the hands and feet of Christ to do God’s work here. When I say God’s work, I mean Love’s work. Charity’s work. Patient work. Insert any word to describe God’s characteristics and boom, you’ve got your plan. “We have God’s joy in our blood,” says Frederick Buechner in Longing for Home. It’s already in us, coursing through our veins.

“Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God,” says Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. We are made in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, we are made in the image and likeness of mercy. Of hope. Of joy. Of love. The very atoms we are made of are bursting with joy. It’s simply the chemical makeup of who we are - who all of creation is. “The atom’s soul is nothing but energy,” says author, George Leonard. “Spirit blazes in the dullest clay. The life of every man - the heart of it - is pure and holy joy.”

When we are joyful, we are more likely to deny ourselves to take up our crosses because we already have everything we need! We find this joy in Christ, in self-denial, in the extension of our hands to help those who are hurting.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says in paragraph 1723, “true happiness is not found in riches or well-being, in human fame or power, or any human achievement… or indeed any creature, but in God alone, the source of every good and all love.” It says this reliance is a “source of wisdom and freedom, of joy and confidence.” (CCC 301). We become wise through authentic experience - especially the connective experience of love and joy. Silliness opens our hearts to joy. We don’t find joy by looking for temporal happiness. We experience joy when we accept and experience our lives exactly as they are: In Christ, through Christ, and for Christ.

https://catholicexchange.com/the-difference-between-joy-and-happiness

Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph. Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium. An Interview with Peter Seewald, 1997.