In my rural French parish, the Roman Catholic Church’s
current trends have varied results. The priest, a charming if hyperactive
little Algerian convert, has distinctly charismatic tendencies. These alienate
a number of bourgeois parishioners, but to my amusement the elderly peasant
folk seem quite to enjoy them. They like the interruption of the Mass at the
Peace, and turn cheerfully to each other for a handshake or a kiss; and they
sing the rather appalling mock-folk hymns without turning a hair.
Before the current Year of Mercy, the emphasis was on Joy.
RCF, the French Christian (officially ecumenical) Radio, changed its signature
phrase to “la joie se partage”: joy is (to be) shared. And a week or two ago, a
hymn told us “Tressaillez de joie!” (quiver
with joy!). It was sung dutifully, rather spiritlessly, by a large and dutiful
congregation comprising all ages. And it’s been making me think about Joy ever
since.
First of all, there are terms which don’t normally enter our
active vocabulary, sometimes for historical reasons. When I taught university
courses in literary history, we used to spend some time considering the word,
and the concept, “honour”. Unless one comes from the Mediterranean and points
East, this is not a word much used except in the odd stock phrase. My students,
interestingly, found “dishonour” much easier to understand than its opposite.
Thinking about the quivers of joy, it occurred to me that
Joy is perhaps such a word. We know it
mainly in expressions or titles – “the Joy of Cooking” – and C.S. Lewis had the
good fortune to be able to play on his wife’s name in Surprised by Joy. But is it part of our active vocabulary?
Pleasure, yes; happiness, yes; relief, yes; but joy? It’s a very strong word, a
very deep word. Perhaps almost nothing that we feel is strong and grand enough
to be called joy; or perhaps it is but we have become unused to employing that
particular word for the feeling. Parents, when they first hold their new baby;
a lover, when the beloved first returns the emotion; a father, when his
drug-addict kid turns up clean for good; a convict, upon hearing that he has
been amnestied; a tennis-player, upon quite unexpectedly winning an almost
impossible tournament; is it joy?
This leads to a further question: if we are to quiver with
joy, what do we quiver about? The answer, of course, is there, in the hymn;
it’s there, in the Bible itself. The answer is Salvation. Our Salvation. But how many of us, outside the Evangelical or
Charismatic world, really know what that means, and feel as well as know? And
yet it is what Jesus talked about, all the time. It’s what He preached, on the
lakeshore as in the synagogue. The Kingdom of God – the reign of God – is here and now. The Messiah whom you’ve been
waiting for all these centuries, he’s right here. The Chosen People’s relation
to their God has been restored.
Yes, well. But we are not Israel; we are the Gentiles, the goyim, the Nations to whom St Paul was
sent to preach – what? That they are the new Israel, and that the God who was
previously Israel’s alone is now theirs also. And that because of that,
Israel’s salvation too is now theirs also. What does that mean, though? Jesus is the Kingdom of God, in-carnate, made
flesh and blood, given to us, rejected by us, killed by us, and resurrected to
put an end to the definitive reign of
Death. That faith in Him is the new Law. The Ark was empty: as a French
commentator put it, you cannot put God under house arrest. What was concrete
and present was the Law. And in the new dispensation the Law, too, is found to
be a hollow container; Jesus is the
new Law. He doesn’t give laws; he is the Law. And he has destroyed Death.
Fine; but we die anyway, right? Yes; but not definitively.
He went through death – and what a death. We can only follow him there. But he
rose again, as the Creed says; and our faith is that we too shall rise again,
recognizable but transformed.
Is not this reason enough for a swooping and embracing joy?
Well, it would be, if we could believe it from day to day. But in real life, we
think about re-ligio, about the
binding-together-again between us and God, mainly as a set of moral duties in
which we are never up to scratch. Not a new Law; rather an endless catalogue of
good deeds we ought to be doing as gratitude for salvation. But it comes to the
same thing. And the Church, let us face it, does little to help. Even the
remarkable current Pope, in spite of his text’s title Gaudium et Spes (joy and hope), spends much of his time fustigating
not only the world but the faithful for
sins of omission and commission, for lack of care, of love, of mercy. In other
words, the Church tends to be more John the Baptist than Jesus; yet at the same
time the faithful are told that their behaviour must be exemplary and that they
must convert the world by the beauty of their lives.
Parents know that children change their ways for the better
more easily when encouraged and praised than when growled at and punished. The mainstream Churches need, I
think, to learn from the evangelicals to concentrate more on both the need for,
and the joy of, salvation. Call it Rescue, if you will: we were all drowning on
a leaky life-raft in the ocean, until we were plucked out and take to a safe
place. As a civilization, we were starting to think that there was Nothing:
Life’s a bitch, then you die. (How people can think that and feel cheerful is
beyond me.) And then this luminous man turns up to rescue us, and we kill him;
and then he turns up again, on a beach, frying fish and smiling. Now do we feel joy?
Tomorrow is not just Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, before the carne, vale, the farewell to meat for
forty days; in England it is Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent when we are
shriven – we confess our sins and receive forgiveness, so that we can start the
exercise of Lent with a clean slate and a joyous heart. Whether we confess
privately to a priest, publicly in the General Confession during a service, in
our own closet or in our own heart, an intelligent confession will leave us
both begging for and receiving forgiveness, ab-solutio,
the washing away of all that clogging dirt. So we can begin Ash Wednesday
shriven, forgiven. And for forty days we can study to be quiet, we can fast a
little or even a lot, we can pray and occupy ourselves intensely with the love
– received and given, given and received -- that is Joy.
"Heaviness may endure for a night; but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30)
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