From Joy Unto Joy

On the Love that Cradles the Cross and Gives it Meaning

The life of faith is a life of pure and unsullied joy. There is nothing in this—nothing in the reality of prayer and love, of ever-deepening union with God and with our brothers and sisters—which brings us sadness. Indeed, when Christ invites us to come to him, to take his yoke on our shoulders and to follow him, he is inviting us from sadness into joy, from unfulfillment into happiness, from loneliness into communion, and from narrowness into the expansiveness of love.

I imagine that your immediate reaction to the above statements may be to feel that they are exaggerated, or at least partial, if not outright wrong. Aren’t we leaving something out? What about the cross, about suffering, about sorrow and pain? Are these not a part of the spiritual life? The reason that I have begun the way that I did is because an important distinction needs to be made. This is a distinction between the essence of the spiritual life and the way in which it is experienced in this fallen world. It is also a distinction between the goal of our journey (a goal already present in a hidden way at every moment along the way) and the path that we take toward this goal. This distinction is important because, as fallen human beings, we have a tendency to lose sight of the goal because of the struggles of the road leading to it; indeed, we tend to view things on the surface, rather than grasping and entering into union with their innermost essence, with the real reality that they are.

This makes me think of a popular quote by Fulton Sheen. He said that “there are thousands of people who hate what they falsely imagine the Catholic Church to be, but perhaps only a handful who, when they know her true nature, still hate her” (my paraphrase). This applies in a profound way to the very invitation that God extends to us to surrender ourselves into his hands, to devote our lives to him, to enter into an intimate relationship of love and prayer before him as our loving Father. We see the struggles involved, the sacrifices this entails, the difficulties that may arise along the way—and indeed we even have a sense that a deepening relationship with God is not going to be like a sedative or a pain-killer which takes away our sensitivity to the anguish and the misfortunes of life. Rather, somehow we even sense that, as our hearts soften under God’s loving touch, they also become soft and sensitive to the pain of a fallen creation. As we live in a culture that idolizes the “pain-free” existence and does everything possible to anaesthetize us to anything that causes us suffering or discomfort, this invitation to a deepening vulnerability of heart can be scary.

Therefore we lose sight of the inestimable gift that prayer and a relationship with God truly is. And we fail to realize that this, indeed, is the only possible thing that can ever truly satisfy the aching pain and emptiness of our hearts, the only thing that can truly shield us from the suffering and wounds that our world, others, or our own sin would inflict upon us. As the Psalmist says:

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, who abides in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the LORD: “My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.” For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. (Ps 91:1-4)

When God touches our hearts through the beauty of his love—mediated through the kindness and the tender gaze of another person, through the liturgy or the teaching of the Church, through the beauty of nature or the very “poetry” of life—we catch a glimpse that he is inviting us tenderly. And he is inviting us to one thing alone: to the happiness of intimacy with him, and, cradled within his enfolding embrace, to an ever-deepening intimacy with our brothers and sisters. The spiritual life, the life of union with God and with others, is pure joy, pure happiness, for it is the fulfillment of the desires implanted in our hearts from the first moment of our conception.

And yet, as is often said, perhaps without a sufficiently clear understanding of its authentic meaning: “Joy comes at a price.” Though the life of faith is a life of pure joy—and indeed the only pure joy there is—it also bears the marks of suffering and sacrifice. The image of a “price,” however, is deeply misleading, because joy is not—and never can be—something bought or possessed, whether with money, or with enjoyable experiences, or even through grasping for human relationships. Rather, joy is always a pure and undeserved gift, which we can only open ourselves to receive with open hands and open heart, like a little child.

What then is the “cost” of joy? There is no cost. Rather, the “cost” consists precisely in letting go of the desire or need to calculate any cost, to measure according to our own standards of control and comprehension. The cost of discipleship, in other words, is precisely that it is uncalculating. As long as a price tag is placed upon it, the door to perfect joy remains closed. But once all considerations of cost are released, surrendered in childlike trust, then the heart experiences the liberation for which it thirsts. It undergoes the “dilation” that allows it to enter back into the expansiveness of love, into the radiant happiness of communion with God and with others—and indeed into a vibrant and life-giving sensitivity to the unspeakable beauty that God has impressed upon all things that he has made.

To pray, therefore, is to become truly alive. To love God is to awaken to the fullness of reality. Indeed, to respond to God’s invitation is to return to the place in which his love is ever poured forth in immense generosity and tenderness. This love touches each person uniquely and unrepeatably in our innermost being, in that sacred place where we are alone before him, cradled in the intimacy of his embrace. To discover this is to discover the joy that nothing can take away—the joy that comes as a pure and undeserved gift, which does not look to our merits or achievements, but only seeks our openness to receive.

In this sense, everything in the spiritual life—and indeed in human existence—flows from the prior and enveloping gift of God, his all-enfolding Love in which every moment of our life is immersed and sustained. To rest in this Love—this perfect, enduring, and ever-present Love—is the true and unbreakable joy. And it is precisely this joy, born in us through the truth of belovedness, that allows us to give ourselves back to God, to open our hearts anew and ever more deeply, so that this joy becomes intimately our own, taking root in our being and flowering as the deepest truth of our existence. Thus our life of faith flows from joy unto joy, and is sustained by God’s joy at every moment along the way.

However, this joy is not incompatible with suffering, pain, and sorrow. Rather, in this fallen world suffering itself is an element of authentic love—and indeed of authentic joy—in that the dilating heart necessarily experiences the pain of being stretched, of being drawn out into the space of encounter and communion from which it has become closed off in sin. Indeed, as it dilates more and more, the heart will resonate in a deepening sensitivity, tenderness, and compassion with the waves of suffering that wash ceaselessly throughout this world, cast like ripples from the core of every human heart.

The spiritual life, the life of ever deepening relationship with God, is therefore a way that involves pain and suffering. However, it would be more accurate to say that it takes up the pain and suffering that are part and parcel of our human existence, and offers us the only adequate answer to them. It does this not by offering us some anaesthetic, or even by shielding us from experiences of hurt and sorrow. Rather, it does this by irradiating all experiences with the light of perfect Love, with the presence of the One who will never forsake and abandon us, and thus turns every lonely “passion,” through his com-passion, into a space of encounter and communion. It also does it by transforming these very experiences in such a way that they deepen rather than militate against joy and the true flowering of our existence in the truth for which God has created us.

But such a movement into the fullness of joy is often experienced as a “pressing up against” the barriers of brokenness and sin, of fear and shame, that close us in on ourselves and within the disorder of this world. This, precisely, is what suffering is: when the infinite desires of our hearts are frustrated by the limitations so violently imposed upon them; when we reach out toward fullness and feel ourselves able only to glimpse it; when we yearn for the totality of love and encounter only a partial, fading love, or even the animosity and misuse that are the very opposite of love. But before encountering God’s Love, before surrendering ourselves to him, we had no way of surpassing these experiences, of rooting ourselves in something deeper which can never be taken away. But God is Love, and God is Joy…and he is always and unceasingly present to each and every one of us. Thus our life can unfold from joy unto joy, even though it passes “through the valley of the shadow of death.” Even in such places, our sufferings themselves are transformed and irradiated by a mysterious light, the light of God’s ever-present and tenderly cradling Love, which holds us at every moment: “I will fear nothing, for you are at my side” (Ps 23:4).

The cross comes, because our hearts are fallen and our world is broken. But the cross, through the redeeming presence of Christ, reveals itself as nothing but the reopening of our existence to Love, and as the union of our being with the pulsating heartbeat of this Love that ever surges throughout creation. To truly love others requires the willingness to suffer for them, to receive them completely into ourselves, to bear them lovingly, and to shield them from the forces of evil with our own loving presence. Is this not the genius of authentic fatherhood and motherhood? Is this not also part of the true ardor of spousal love? And yet, in truth, is not such a willingness to suffer an essential ingredient of authentic joy?

The flight from suffering easily becomes the flight from joy, for it becomes the flight from love, since love is always vulnerable in its tender acceptance and generous gift of self. The flight from suffering becomes the flight from truth, in which the human heart acknowledges the woundedness and disorder within, and, opening this to the outpouring Mercy of God, undergoes the labor-pains which bring authentic sanctity to birth in our lives. Yes, love bears the inner form of sacrifice—which truly means “making-sacred” (sacra – “holy” + facere – “to make”). And sacrifice, in turn, is nothing but the expansiveness of love, which receives and gives at every moment unconditionally, being made present in all the details of our lives and relationships.

This is why we are invited not to flee from the suffering inherent in love…this dance of brokenness and beauty, in which the beauty gradually irradiates and transforms the brokenness, making it shine with a yet deeper splendor. We are invited not to take refuge in the narrowness of a sedated and anaesthetized existence, in which we are numb to the fullness and richness of being as God has made it, and as he is restoring it through his Crucified and Risen Son. This being said, however, we are nonetheless not asked to focus upon suffering itself. No, this would be to fix our gaze upon entirely the wrong thing, upon something secondary, temporary, and passing. Rather, the only thing deserving of our full attention is Love, Love, and Love alone…that is, upon the Beloved, whose radiant and infinitely lovable countenance ceaselessly invites our grateful and awe-filled contemplation. Yes, and in him we discover the Joy that has gone before us, that cradles us unceasingly, and that awaits us as the fullness toward which our whole existence is journeying. Suffering is indeed only the shadow-side of Joy, since it is simply part of the dialectic of Love’s transforming activity within this world.

When many people look upon the Cross of Jesus, all that they see is the suffering and the sacrifice. But this is the worst of mistakes, since the Cross is not about the victory of evil, of sadness, of loneliness, but rather about the victory of Love, Joy, and Intimacy. This Love, this Joy, this Intimacy is so strong, so unbreakably alive, that it can irradiate the very sorrows of life, the very suffering of existence, and make them the birth-pangs of an ever-greater joy…through an ever greater intimacy with the One who is perfect Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and Love.

Joy is inherently expansive. It dilates the heart in love, as it draws us out beyond ourselves in a movement toward what attracts us, toward the ineffable Beauty who touches and invites us into intimacy with himself. Did not Jesus show us this, and bring it about, by his complete openness, his complete acceptance and self-giving, upon the Cross? Yes, here his entire existence cries out openness and the expansiveness of love… And he wants to draw us into this same openness, in a dilation of heart that allows us to enter into ever deeper and more intimate contact with the arms of God’s Love that surrounds and cradles us. This openness allows us to drink, ever anew, from the wellspring of unbreakable joy that is present and at work already now, and which carries us throughout our life toward the fullness of unbreakable joy that awaits us at the end: in the perfect intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.