The joy of his love

Give us the joy of your love. These words of a responsorial psalm one day during last Advent touched me particularly. I printed it out, added a photo from my pilgrimage to the Holy Land and made myself a nice little poster. What are some favourite scripture passages, one-liners even, that inspire and delight your soul?

I feel privileged that this column appears in the Easter issue of The Southern Cross. I have been concerned that maybe I could be more positive; I always seem to be challenging people in my various family publications. Have I got people thinking about the role of the laity as I challenged them to do last month? In his column, Emmanuel Ngara challenged us to ensure that proper formation exists for the laity, spiritual formation that is. Sounds like work, doesn’t it? But in the spirit of Easter, maybe my theme Give us the joy of your love could make that work a spiritual treasure.

Easter is about new life which should be a source of great joy. A new baby, a new grandchild, a mother saved from despair and a baby saved from abortion are also sources of great joy. And yet Easter comes only after the dreadful grief of Good Friday and the desolation of experiencing abandonment of Holy Saturday. It is so hard to say, the deeper the sorrow the greater the potential for joy, but there is truth in that even though it can take a very long time.

What is joy? It is associated with happiness, but is more than happiness. Some of the marriage movements refer to a relationship cycle of Romance, Disillusionment and Joy.

Joy is a deeper version of the lightness of romance; born out of suffering and pain and the result of making a decision to love. The joy we’re speaking of is not just any kind of joy but the joy of God’s love. There is a Christian magazine called Joy. It’s a good title, but one that challenges me as a Catholic. We should not be, but are we as Catholics somehow too focused on negatives: the cross, sin and suffering?

The theology of the body, a new and growing movement is about joy too: the joy of recognising the preciousness and value of our physical bodies. Particularly for couples committed to one another in marriage that is a joy and a joy born of love, God’s love and marital love. Those preparing for marriage are already introduced to this concept.

Jesus’ death is an essential part of the Paschal Mystery. As human beings, we cannot but experience death in our lives. We hear about it every day in the news and it is brought much closer when death and especially tragic death occurs amongst our families, friends and workmates.

Two friends of mine both experienced the loss of a son in a car accident recently young men, crashed into a tree, hardly at the start of their adult lives, leaving behind a girlfriend and a baby. It makes one cry out to God, with Jesus on the cross: Why? Why now? Why have you forsaken me? The answer is a long time coming for those shocked and grieving families left behind

We have to travel the road to joy, to take the first step and go and find God’s love and the joy it can bring. God doesn’t cause the pain, but Jesus Father experienced pain too, as much as any grieving parent.

The miracle of God and his greatness and goodness is that he is able to offer us joy, the joy of his love. At first our love causes us to experience the agony in a garden or at the roadside, the carrying of a cross up a hill or into a home of extreme sadness, the pain of witnessing and sharing the suffering of another, the desolation of being left, forsaken, abandoned for hours, weeks, days, months or maybe years. But through all this time God’s love is present, sharing the pain, slowly leading us to live again, to new life, to Resurrection joy.

During these special days of Holy Week it might be meaningful to share with one another as family people some experiences of the paschal mystery in our own lives and how God was present there, in the bad, mad, sad and glad times, leading us to a deeper understanding of his love and the fullness of joy awaiting us one day.