On Endurance and Joy

The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity

O LORD, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A few weeks back, the first few verses of Romans 5 were used to frame a discussion of suffering and endurance. There is an interesting counter-point to the question of suffering, though, and that is happiness. What is happiness and does God want us to be happy? It seems a simple enough question, but in reality there are a lot of particular issues which must be considered in light of what happiness ought to mean to a Christian.

In our secular Western society, happiness is very strongly tied to material possessions. John Locke’s treatises on government had a significant influence on Western political thought. His famous line “life, liberty and property,” was adapted in the American Declaration of Independence to suggest that all men have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of happiness is equated with the accumulation of material possession. While this explicit example is American, it is easy to see how consumerism and commercialism have vast influence throughout the Western world, and influence the minds of many Christians. The heresy of Prosperity Gospel is firmly rooted in the notion that God wants us all to be happy, and thus that he will reward the faithful with material wealth.

If not wealth then, what is happiness? The satisfaction of our desires? In a manner of speaking this could be viewed as something God wants for us, but only at a certain point in our Christian journey. For God desires not happiness as we define it, but rather joy. Surely joy is just an extreme of happiness, however? Again, not precisely. Used imprecisely and in common secular use today, joy is merely an extreme of happiness. A child might express joy over receiving a gift they truly desired, or some other unexpected fulfilment of a wish or desire. To a Christian, however, Scripture tells us something else about joy.

Going back to the question of suffering (as the question, “doesn’t God want me to be happy?” can often come up while enduring suffering), we see that suffering leads to endurance, which leads to character, which leads to hope which is in Christ. Suffering and endurance have previously been explored, which leaves an understanding of character and hope, and how they relate to joy, as opposed to happiness.

Character, it would seem, is a form of understanding. It is the progress we make from enduring our suffering to understanding our endurance. It is the time when we approach suffering from the perspective of “God, why have you allowed this to happen to me?” and instead, Like St Paul, are able to rejoice in our sufferings for the opportunities it provides and the faith it illuminates. The Epistle of James puts it this way, “for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing,” (Jas 1. 3, 4).

Our character builds up our faith, which leads to assurance of hope, which is in Christ. In hope, therefore, we have joy. As St Paul continues in Romans:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. (Romans 5. 6-11)

Here, St Paul speaks to what hope is. It is the hope we are offered in Christ’s sacrifice and the creation of an opportunity for reconciliation with God.

If our hope is in the assurance of reconciliation, then surely our joy is in reconciliation itself. For the entire salvation story aims for this as its goal of reconciliation with God, and is a process of sanctification by which we become more as God intended and more of the image and likeness of God. St Ignatius of Loyala suggests, “It is not hard to obey when we love the one whom we obey.” This love of God, as St Bernard of Clairvaux expounds on, affects how we perceive God, our relationship with him, our own sanctification and even our goals in life.

Joy is experienced in multiple ways in our life, however. It is sometimes contextual, and sometimes is not contextual. When we experience joy during difficult trials or other situations in which one would not expect the feeling of happiness. This again is proof that God’s joy is not simply something that relates to happiness but rather to God. Joy is incarnational; it is not always attached to circumstances which can be perceived on this earth, but instead reflects a breaking in or glimpse of God. It is a preview of what we are to experience in Heaven. In The Weight of Glory, CS Lewis writes:

At present, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directly on God; but the mind, and still more the body, receives life from Him at a thousand removes—through our ancestors, through our food, through the elements. The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountain-head that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy.

This further explains at times why, even when something occurs that fulfils our personal desires, we do not feel either joy or happiness. Contextual joy is similarly created in doing what pleases God. When we do something that pleases ourselves but separates us from God, we are no closer to feeling his joy. When we do something that we know pleases him, however, it can bring us closer to that joy.

So then, does God want us to be happy? Well, not really. What God truly and earnestly desires is for reconciliation with us, for the joy that it will bring both us and him. Happiness is fleeting, and fickle, produced of our own desires. Joy on the other hand is of God, incarnations of his love for us and his desire that we be reconciled to him.

If happiness can in some manner be related to John Locke’s philosophy of life, liberty and property, then perhaps for the Christian, joy may be found in a life of service to God, freedom in Christ, and the pursuit of salvation.

On the Evils of Contract Bridge

The Epiphany of our Lord

O GOD, who by the leading of a star didst manifest thy only-begotten Son to the Gentiles: Mercifully grant, that we, who know thee now by faith, may be led onward through this earthly life, until we see the vision of thy heavenly glory; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Baptism of our Lord

O HEAVENLY Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ did take our nature upon him, and was baptized for our sakes in the river Jordan: Mercifully grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may also be partakers of thy Holy Spirit; through him whom thou didst send to be our Saviour and Redeemer, even the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epiphany of our Lord is actually the 6th of January, but is often transferred to the preceding Sunday. It is a continuation of a season that includes the Nativity, Circumcision, and Baptism of the Lord. In secular terms, it is also the first Sunday after New Year’s Day, which caps off the secular ‘Holiday Season’ of Christmas and New Year’s. For the Americans, this is a season which begins after their Thanksgiving in the end of November. This year in particular, the American shopping holiday of Black Friday--which truly does speak to the supremacy of materialism in modern Western culture--was larger in places like Canada and the United Kingdom than any time previously, despite the fact that Thanksgiving is not celebrated in the United Kingdom and is celebrated as Harvest Thanksgiving in October in Canada.

It is a season in which consumerism and consumption are foremost in the minds of many. In its secular context, even the best messages to come out of Christmas are consumerist and materialist, speaking to the joy of giving things and even ensuring that all receive something and are able to have a feast on Christmas. At worst, it is a season in which we show off. We consume giant feasts, and treat all our relations and friends with gifts and we drink considerable amounts of alcohol, particularly on New Year's Eve. Even for those of us who focus our celebrations on Advent and the Nativity of Christ, there is a strong pressure to conform to these pressures. Santa Clause is just as prominent in Christian households as non-Christian households.

The pressure of secular culture can be overwhelming and it's not surprising that it infiltrates even Christian households, and it’s something that detracts from what CS Lewis describes as one of the cardinal virtues of Christianity in his Mere Christianity. He later goes on to describe and define temperance in a section that gives the title to this blog post:

One great piece of mischief has been done by the modern restriction of the word Temperance to the question of drink. It helps people to forget that you can be just as intemperate about lots of other things. A man who makes his golf or his motor-bicycle the centre of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as “intemperate” as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily: bridge-mania or golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not deceived by externals.

The point Lewis makes is two-fold. First, the great piece of mischief he refers to is the fact that in modern English, temperance has come to be associated with the abstinence from drink, rather than, “all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further.” Second, and perhaps more importantly, he points out that it is the substituting of the excess of things for God in our lives.

When we allow the influence of the world to affect our views of Christmas and how it should be celebrated, however imperceptibly, we are shifting our focus away from Christ. Whenever we allow something--be it consumerism or a love of contract bridge, as Lewis notes--to replace the focus of our lives, albeit temporarily, from Christ to that other thing, we run the risk that Christ will be completely supplanted in our lives.

In his epistle to the Romans, St Paul reminds us that, “you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves to righteousness,” (Rm 6. 17-18). In this, he reinforces the words of Christ who is recorded in the Gospel of John as saying, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free... Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin... So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed,” (Jn 8. 31-35).

Intemperance here refers to the sins of lust and gluttony. Holy Scripture’s prohibitions (Prv 6; Gal 5) are clear and many Christians over the centuries have spoken to the impact of the sins of intemperance on our lives. In his Summa Theologica, St Thomas Aquinas wrote on the nature of both lust and temperance. His work remains one of the most influential in Western Christianity, indeed CS Lewis’s own writings on the cardinal virtues in Mere Christianity are based on the definitions of the cardinal and theological virtues.

Epiphany is a time in which we remember Christ's manifestation to the gentiles, and it caps of a time when we celebrate God's love for mankind: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life,” (Jn 3. 16). It is a time when we are meant to be fully focused on the one who saves us from slavery to sin, yet the secular world is telling us instead to focus on something which will lead to sin. 

This is a season in which we are meant to contemplate the importance of the incarnation. It is a time when we are reminded of the joy of the personal relationship we can have with God which is enabled through Christ. Instead, for many it is a season in which they are encouraged to view it as positive we buy gifts, eat giant feasts and, in the case of New Year’s, drink. These are presented as virtues: generosity, peace and joyfulness. 

As we enter Epiphanytide, a time of growth and renewal when we are reminded of these truths of the incarnation, we should seek to grow truly in faith, the freedom of Christ, and in true virtue, temperance.