Speaking of Joy

True, real joy always comes to us only as a present. It originates in God. Human joy is a share through grace in the joy of God, in God’s nature, which is nothing but the sphere of supreme joy. The sources of true joy, therefore, are found where the creature waits for God. Joy is not a part of our existence; nevertheless our existence is completed only in it. That is why the essential part of our existence is grace. Or, as Pascal says: “Man infinitely transcends man.” That is why joy cannot be regarded as something ready-made, like something provided externally in the world, in the exterior layers of our being. It is not part of the area of pleasure and distraction. Here we shall describe the negative condition of joylessness, a situation that is perhaps the commonest experience of our life. What are its ingredients?

First, probably, a tired lack of involvement. There were once in our life times of enthusiasm, of glowing and vital life, of passionate involvement. Now everything is grey and an effort. The fire of desire and longing has somehow gone out. It is laziness, the incapacity of living with a light inside us, the fact that things are easy, all too easy, that makes us so tired. It is not the difficult things that weaken us, but what is all too easy. We no longer seek great things. We rest satisfied with what has been allotted us by a blind fate. “Don’t think too much! Don’t expect too much! Everyone does things like this! They have always done so!”

We have an irradicable distrust of joy, of novelty. That is why sometimes hard words have to be spoken, why Christ had to speak them, who was wholly love, mildness, and mercy, words to shake up us people who are asleep, blunted, and indifferent. He had to break through the hard crust of our mediocrity, he had to use the frightful hammer of his word. He had to break open the prison of our uncaring attitude to life in which we suffocate, die of thirst, and grow blind. He never spoke a “pious,” soporific language. He never reproached those who were possessed. He liberated them. Perhaps the contemporary possession is nothing but a tired lack of involvement, the existential disappointment and lack of strength of our age. Perhaps the possessed of today are tortured by the power of joylessness.

Cecilia Frigati, Earthy #2, acrylic on canvas, 2023. Used by permission.

We have to be very careful: lack of involvement is a gentle slope down which one can slide almost imperceptibly, and no life, no profession, no temperament, not even sanctity is free of its danger. Tiredness and sadness: where do they come from? First from quite small causes: too much work, no security, debts, separation, loneliness, sickness, setbacks, incompatibility of faith with hard reality, unfulfillable morality, a Church that is disappointed…. The list could be continued endlessly. Life has so many limitations, disappointments, and impossibilities. We are only tired and absent. Above all absent from ourselves. The worst thing is that when one is sunk so deep in absence one can no longer be conscious of one’s condition. Happy is he who recognizes his unhappiness, suffers from it, he who can really be unhappy and not just simply limp.

This tired lack of involvement creates in our being a profound lack of confirmation, a dangerous dissatisfaction. We are dissatisfied with everything. We feel as if we had no being, as if we were no one. This is why we seek with nervous haste for self-confirmation, stimuli, experiences, riches. We plunge into external things in order to forget ourselves, precisely because we cannot really forget ourselves. We live in a state of mind in which everything appears in a sombre light. There is no healthy climate of thought and feeling.

This gives rise to existential flatness. Life somehow becomes all on one level. It is easy to live an uninvolved, unconfirmed, and unhappy life; it takes no effort. To be happy we have to exert ourselves. What can still really take place in a joyless life can equally well happen to other people. In joylessness human life becomes universally livable. Nothing unique ever happens.

This explains the fact that a joyless life is a mediocre one. This kind of person lives in a world that may perhaps function well, but it is flat. Joy and promise are enviously put aside. Any question of fighting for things with one’s heart is regarded as an illusion, and those things are worked for that are tangible, that can be attained and possessed. The world is reduced to a wretched state: everything is uniformly grey, ordinary, graspable and has its price; what is new is pushed aside with a tired movement of the hand and is declared unimportant and unserious.

Joyless life becomes heavy and opaque. Life becomes commonplace. It is no longer felt that a being can be more than an appearance. But only the mysterious is supportable in the long run; we can really love only that which has mystery about it. Only a thing that one can control can be without mystery, not a person to whom one looks up. Wherever we experience true joy, we also directly experience mystery. In a world without mystery and without joy, however, life lacks relationships. Words lose their meaning. They no longer bring things close, but, rather, push them away. We have talking without an object, a flood of meaningless words.

This kind of life cannot be borne. That is why the joyless person plunges into existential restlessness. Such a person, who has emptied and devalued his world, no long finds any place for wonder, for amazed lingering and remaining. He no longer rests anywhere in his life. However many things he chases after, he finds everywhere the same quality of negligence, lack of confirmation, mediocrity, and meaninglessness. This is the reason for “bad” satisfaction (there is also a good one), the reason for the unrest, the excitement, curiosity, inconstancy, and distraction. The joyless person would like to be everywhere and in reality is nowhere.

In the long run, this kind of life leads to exhaustion. There is nothing more, nothing that allows for daring, for self-sacrifice and responsibility. Life becomes dull-hearted and lazy, tired and blunted, depressed and petty. The person who unloads work becomes tired; but the person who freely accepts the “burden of joy” becomes light and strong.

From the practice of two qualities of human authenticity, reverence and joy, grows service, joyful, helpful assistance, the lively, watchful, and healing creation of a new lightness in the world, the readiness to stay quietly with a suffering creature. The life of Jesus was one of constant fidelity to help and service. It was expressed in the fact that he persisted all his life in a narrow and inimical environment, in a cruel corner of our earth, dispensing comfort, rest, and inner peace, although the wide pagan world would probably have welcomed him far more rapidly.

Source: Ladislaus Boros, Meeting God in Man (Doubleday, 1971).