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.

The Wisdom of Saints: St Bernard of Clairvaux

The Feast of Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, France, Doctor and Poet, 1153

O GOD, who by thy Holy Spirit hast given unto one man a word of wisdom, and to another a word of knowledge, and to another the gift of tongues: We praise thy Name for the gifts of grace manifested in thy servant Bernard, and we pray that thy Church may never be destitute of the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

St Bernard of Clairvaux was a 12th century French abbot. Born to a noble family in 1090, he received an excellent quality education during which he developed a love of reading Holy Scripture. Still at a young age, he became concerned with avoiding the snares and temptations of worldly life, and felt drawn to an ascetic and monastic lifestyle that would help him avoid that. Upon the death of his mother, he joined a relatively newly formed monastic order. It followed a reformed version of the Benedictine rules, and the Order became known as the Cistercians due to their founding at Cîteaux Abbey. In his early years at Cîteaux he impressed his monastic superiors with his devotion and spiritual growth, and was soon sent, with a dozen other monks, to Clairvaux Abbey where he was soon appointed Abbot.

In his career as Abbot of Clairvaux, he founded a number of other Cistercian monasteries and wrote a number of works which survive to this day. While he is perhaps today most famous for his writings, in the 12th century he was a well-known figure throughout the Church and in particular in France where he resided and was involved in defending the Church against the state and becoming involved in some of the political struggles of the Church, as well becoming a standard bearer for the Second Crusade throughout France and Germany at the request of Pope Eugene III, a fellow Cistercian. The failure of the Second Crusade led to a decline in Bernard’s reputation, and he died soon after in 1153. His reputation recovered after his death, however, and he was canonized in 1174 and made a Doctor of the Church, recognized as a Teacher of the Faith in the Anglican tradition, in 1830.

One of his key works was De diligendo Dei (On Loving God) which discussed the nature of love, God’s love for man, the debt of love owed to God and why we ought to love Him, and is perhaps best remembered for his introduction of the concept of the four degrees of love, which describes the pilgrimage which all Christians proceed through in their growing love for God.

In the first degree of love, man loves oneself for self’s sake. St Bernard summarizes this love thusly:

because love is natural, it is only right to love the Author of nature first of all. Hence comes the first and great commandment, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.' But nature is so frail and weak that necessity compels her to love herself first; and this is carnal love, wherewith man loves himself first and selfishly, as it is written, 'That was not first which is spiritual but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual,' (I Cor. 15. 46).

In this natural order, man does not truly know God, and therefore is stuck at the base level of loving himself before being able progress towards loving the Author of love, as St Bernard puts it. St Bernard goes even further, suggesting that this stage is not only natural but almost required. He argues that when in times of trouble we call upon the Lord for strength, we ultimately come to glorify him for answering our call. “loving only himself, begins to love God by reason of that very self-love; since he learns that in God he can accomplish all things that are good, and that without God he can do nothing.”

As is alluded to, this leads to the second degree of love, love of God for self’s sake. Even the hardest heart, contends St Bernard, would become “softened by the goodness of such a Savior, so that he would love God not altogether selfishly, but because He is God?” Put otherwise, the distinction between the first and second degrees of love is always for self’s sake, but during the first degree one has not yet begun to shift love of self to love of God for what he has done.

It is the third degree of love in which love becomes love of God for God’s sake, rather than our own. As St Bernard puts it, “Whosoever praises God for His essential goodness, and not merely because of the benefits He has bestowed, does really love God for God's sake, and not selfishly.” More simply, the third degree of love comes when we love God for who He is and not merely because of what He has done for us.

The fourth, and final, degree of love is loving oneself for God’s sake. This is a simple and contemporary translation of St Bernard’s four degrees, but interestingly a more direct translation taken straight from the chapter title would read, “the fourth degree of love: wherein man does not even love self save for God's sake.” This degree of love is perhaps the most difficult to understand when just viewing the summary, but St Bernard’s meaning is clear in his own explanation:

In Him should all our affections centre, so that in all things we should seek only to do His will, not to please ourselves. And real happiness will come, not in gratifying our desires or in gaining transient pleasures, but in accomplishing God's will for us: even as we pray every day: 'Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven' (Mt. 6. 10)

The fourth degree of love comes when we truly turn our lives to God such that we love Him unconditionally and, “trampling down,” as St John Chrysostom’s Divine Liturgy says, “all carnal desires, we may enter upon a spiritual manner of living, thinking and doing such things as are well pleasing to [God].” The love of oneself comes not for any remotely selfish purpose, but rather it is a reflection of God’s unconditional love for us which is reflected through our imperfect attempt at unconditional love for Him.

Through his four degrees of love, St Bernard of Clairvaux displays both his insights into the nature of love and human nature itself. He provides us with a standard and roadmap by which we can judge our own degree of love for God and guide ourselves to a deeper love of Him.