We say things like Joy to the world at this time of year, and we hear a great deal about happiness of having family around, about the Joy of Christmas, and I thought, since it IS Christmas week, maybe we could muse about that for a bit today.
And we hear it everywhere, there’s joy if we just buy this, or eat that, or travel to this beach, or, or, or. But with a week like this last one, with the Bondi attacks which happened when people were celebrating the JOY of Hanukkah, the Brown university shootings, it seems reasonable to ask, are we missing something? There was a piece by Kathryn Jean Lopez that caught my attention because, in it, there was a link to a video of some Israeli hostages who were celebrating Hanukkah in a tunnel knowing that they were about to be killed by their Hamas captors. In that video there are six men, praying psalms, singing, being comrades, family if you will, to each other, all before they are executed. And nothing I will talk about today should cause us to ignore the horror of what these men endured, BUT it should help us to understand that joy, real joy, is possible no matter what we face. And that joy can only come from one place. And it isn’t shopping. And because this is Christmas week, I hope you will indulge me in some openly theological musings.
There was a Catholic priest Fr Delp, Ms Lopez mentions, who was writing from the Tegel German prison death camp, and his writings were smuggled out on scraps of paper before he was hanged, and he wrote, quote “The conditions for true joy have nothing to do with conditions of our exterior life, but consist of man’s interior frame of mind and competence, which make it possible now and again for him to sense, even in adverse external circumstances, what life is basically about.” End quote. Interesting word there, competence. And he wrote this from a concentration camp, starving, lice infected, and knowing that he would likely die like so many of the others. He goes on, quote, “How should we live so that we are capable—or can become capable—of true joy? This question should occupy us more today than it has in the past,” end quote. Again, he’s in a prison camp, and HE says, today more than most. Kinda gives us some perspective, doesn’t it? And this priest goes on, quote “Man should take joy as seriously as he takes himself. And he should believe in himself, believe in his heart and in his Lord God, even through darkness and distress—that he is created for joy.” End quote. Man is created for Joy. What a statement!
And we actually know, scientifically if you will, what brings humans joy. I mean, people study the topic and compile statistics, and when they do, they basically arrive at the point that St Thomas Aquinas arrived at in the late 1200’s, but hey, better late than never.
From St Thomas, quote “the final happiness of man does not consist in anything short of the contemplation of God”. End quote. Well Aquinas was a Catholic who meditated and wrote for his entire life, so you have to expect that answer from him. But what’s interesting is that everything he wrote back then seems to match what we have spent the time since the end of the 13th century to today trying to understand. Is it just me, or isn’t it interesting that we keep asking questions, the answers to which we already know? The only issue is that we aren’t satisfied with them.
Anyway, most of the studies conclude the same thing which is that happiness wasn’t about eliminating bad things, or bad thoughts, but managing them and then accentuating the many positive things in life. Which is what our ancient weird odd friar Thomas Aquinas said. He didn’t say that our earthly wants and passions were bad, after all God created those too, but that we shouldn’t allow those cravings to control us. Now of course that’s not easy, but what he said was that we needed to be consciously aware of our impulses, and that doing that would help us have control over them. So that means that we need our intellect for happiness. Because it is our reason that manages our passions. Managing passions.. Didn’t we just talk about Madison and how we needed to control our “unruly passions”? We did.
And that relationship between what we feel, our passions, and our intellect leads to the third thing that Aquinas talks about, our will. We can and MUST choose good things, they don’t just happen, they are a conscious choice. And I have to choose them over perhaps a shorter-term satisfaction over what I might crave right now, be that something physical, or some emotional release of my unruly passions to quote James Madison. And that intellectual willpower, to choose the right thing, and here we’re not talking about the unimportant things we usually mean about when we talk about self-control, like being on a diet, or smoking, but far more importantly to choose to properly order our thoughts, and to put God in the center. To refuse to give in to negativity and be more like our Israelis celebrating in the tunnel, or our priest in the concentration camp, and that is a skill that we can develop. We can get better at it by practicing it.
In that sense, a great intellect ISN’T the ability to ace your finals or to remember how to properly apply Boyles Gas law, but the willingness and ability to contemplate and appreciate divine truth independently of our mortal brainpower. And that takes effort, deliberate, repetitive, effort. As well as the willpower to push the trivial out of our way. Again, remember James Madison on our tendency to be consumed by the ridiculous.
There are, according to St Thomas, three keys to happiness. The first is knowledge. And that isn’t a general, who was the first president, kind of knowledge, it’s knowledge of ourselves. Do we know what drives our desires, our habits, why we act the way we do, why we chose something destructive for instance, and why we are able to resist something else? That’s step one.
Once we understand those things, we need to manage those things. So, the person who is endlessly curious SHOULD indulge that, the person who is passionate about learning, SHOULD use every opportunity that they have to learn, the person who is caring SHOULD indulge that emotion. The person who covets, probably should work just as hard to not pick up the stuff in the store that doesn’t belong to them, or to think about the person who they perceive to have a better life than they do. Whatever your positive impulses are, cultivate them. Whatever your negative ones are, actively work to repress them. And don’t hang out with people who feed your baser emotions, either physically or on social media. Cut them out of your life entirely.
And that requires the last thing, willpower. And there is lots of evidence that willpower is like any other muscle. It improves with use.
Now as Aquinas tells us, that still leads to imperfect happiness, because doing all that perfectly is impossible obviously. But far more difficult is that they can be contradictory. So, you’re trying to be a great provider to your family, which is objectively good, and you struggle with wanting prestige, which is prideful and sinful. Well, doing both is GOING to be difficult, but you have to try to be mindful of your motivations, and of your passions.
I go back to those Jews in the tunnel in Gaza. It would be an extraordinary act of human will to not want to escape, or to be fed, or to be hugged by their families, or to want to know that those same families knew that they were ok, and I’m sure that they did ALL those things! And STILL they CHOOSE to celebrate Hanukkah in that tunnel, to recite the psalms, to be brothers, to not lose their humanity in the face of the gravest inhumanity. A couple of Islamists in Bondi Australia cannot stop people like them. They were, are rather, too powerful. We had a polish priest in our parish before we moved out here. His job, as a child in the concentration camps, was to load the bodies of the children who had died in the night into the furnaces so that they could be cremated. And when he grew up, he decided that he wanted to understand what could make man that sick. He CHOSE that. That’s a willpower that I willingly admit that I do not possess. But it is POSSIBLE to possess it.
This week, for Christians, we celebrate God becoming man, CHOOSING to live as man, with all the temptation and pain that comes with that. And it all looks good in tinsel and wrapping paper, but I actually HAVE a barn, with animals. And it smells, and it’s either very cold, or very hot, and it’s always drafty, and it can STILL be a place of great peace and wonder, if we deliberately CHOOSE to make it so, and to see the Baby there for what He is. He is the ultimate CHOICE. And therefore the ultimate gift.
Joy to the world indeed! Joy to the world every day, in every circumstance, and my Hannukah and Christmas wish for you all is that same HABIT of Joy.
JOY
George Washington cautioned in his Farewell Address that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
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