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 Discipline

The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

KEEP, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy; and, because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Discipleship is a key principle, often referred to in our Christian journey. When we say discipleship, however, what precisely do we mean? What does it mean to be a disciple of Christ? The word disciple has the same root as the word discipline, which has a meaning of accepting a teaching, practising a teaching or being taught. In the Christian then, a disciple of Christ is one who submits themselves to Christ’s teachings in order to practice them.

This idea of submission is difficult for many people. It goes against the grain of modern liberalism, which tells us that freedom is the ultimate virtue. The freedom to make up our own mind and do what we want. Discipleship then becomes difficult because we do not want to submit to Christ, but rather to pick and choose the examples of him we will follow. This occurs either by outright ignoring anything which might be difficult or which might challenge us to change our ways, or by trying to justify our actions through creative eisegesis (the reading in of our own interpretation to the Bible).

GK Chesterton once wrote that, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.” This is the reality that confronts many Christians who are unwilling to make the changes necessary in their lives to be faithful disciples of Christ.

After freedom, Western society promotes comfort and ease as values. Convenience takes the place of quality and effort. Applied to Christianity, our convenience takes the place of Truth when we refuse to submit. Christianity does not, however, promise ease. It promises Truth. To substitute anything else for it is to remove the essence of Christianity.

Being a disciple of Christ requires discipline. It requires the intentional turning away from that which separates us from Christ’s teachings. It requires an honest desire to live in God’s will and not our own. It requires a willingness to do things we might find uncomfortable. Christ calls us to share the gospel with others; in a society in which it is impolite to speak of religion and politics, it can be challenging to break those norms to speak to others of our faith. Social values Jesus calls us to are radically different than norms of society.

What’s more, if we are truly submit to Christ, it means understanding what Christ asks of us. Sometimes when someone misapplies scripture in order to support their own viewpoint, it is not intentional malice or even cognitive dissonance, but merely a reflection of their poor understanding of Holy Scripture.

Discipline itself is the only solution for anyone who seeks to become a true disciple. Discipline of prayer, of Scripture reading, of contemplation and self-examination and other edifying practices that seek to turn us from our old selves and towards Christ. The use of spiritual disciplines has a history that dates to the Old Testament. The imposition of ashes was a practice used to display repentance towards God, and at times would be engaged in corporately as entire communities sought to turn themselves towards God after a period of rebellion and turning from him. To modern Christians, spiritual disciplines remain integral the practice of discipleship.

The reading of Holy Scripture is one of the most important tools at our command to understand God’s will. In reading it, we come to know God better. It is a recording of God’s interaction with humanity, and of Christ’s life and earthly teachings. By familiarizing ourselves with God’s word, it becomes possible to avoid falling into error through ignorance. While no amount of reading of Scripture can fully prevent us from falling into interpretive error, it does make it far less likely to misinterpret or apply a particular verse when we would know that such an interpretation would place that verse in opposition to other parts of Scripture.

Scripture reading is God’s written testament to us. It is one of his primary tools for communicating himself to us. It is also the most impersonal. It is through prayer that we are able to come to God and learn of him most personally and fully. Where the Bible speaks in broad terms of God’s relationship with Israel, or Christ’s teachings to the Jews and the early disciples, through prayer we can come to know God’s particular will for us.

Prayer comes in many forms, but so far as disciplines that aid us in becoming disciples of Christ, practices such as lectio divina, which uses Scripture as a tool to uncover God’s particular will for us today, and the daily examen of St Ignatius of Loyala, which provides a model of reflection upon our day to help us identify areas where we need God’s support and where we ought to thank God for his blessings.

These prayer disciplines, if used regularly, help us to come into a rhythm of conversation with God in which we explore how we are currently living our lives and how we ought to be living our lives. For the daily examen, knowledge of Scripture is important as it can be difficult to understand where we ought to pray if we know nothing of God’s nature. If we do not know how to identify sin, we do not know how to pray to God for strength to overcome our sinful urges and desires. We do not know what blessings we ought to pray for, what opportunities we ought to pursue with God’s help or the things God calls us to do if we aren’t familiar with Scripture.

It takes discipline to engage in these practices regularly. It also takes practice. Abbot John Chapman of Downside once reflected that we ought to, “pray as best [we] can and not as [we] can’t.” As we take this discipline what we cannot pray becomes less and less, and the discipline of prayer becomes the simple practice of prayer. The discipline of conversation becomes the privilege of conversation. St Ignatius of Loyala wrote that, “it is not hard to obey when we love the one whom we obey.” It is through prayer and the building of our relationship with God that we come to love him.

Discipleship is not easy. It requires intentional discipline. It requires devotion. It requires submission. It requires a willingness to engage in radical change that moves us beyond secular norms of politics and society. In the act of giving up ourselves, however, we become who we are meant to be in Christ.

While we may be called to endure much in our lives, and while taking on such disciplines and being willing to give up who we were can be daunting, it is the assurance of joy that comes from abiding in God’s will that proves Christ’s words: “for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light,” (St Mt 11. 30).