“Joy deficiency, a pervasive phenomenon, presents with many symptoms – restlessness, anxiety, emptiness, malaise, inability to focus, insomnia, fatigue, irritability, and apathy. Excessive stress decreases efficiency, productivity, and creativity. Stress also weakens attention, worsens most medical conditions and hastens your escape from the present moment” (The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living, xiii)
Joy deficiency, what an interesting phenomenon. Though the author, Dr. Amit Sood, does not offer a definition of joy nor joy deficiency, that I could find, it is a rather interesting notion as it would be hard to say that we are in want for pleasure, on demand pleasure at that, in our society. If most of us reading this have every conceivable material need (housing, water, food, shelter, love and education, etc), why then do we face a pervasively joy deficient culture?
“We are dealing here with two profoundly different experiences, pleasure and joy, which underlie two distinct conceptions of happiness: One belongs to the domain of the senses; the other belongs directly to the moral and spiritual level. Let us note their essential differences: Pleasure is an agreeable sensation, a passion caused by contact with some exterior good. Joy, however, is something interior, like the act that causes it” (Morality: The Catholic View, 78). Distinguishing that joy arises from the interior and pleasure is dependent on exterior goods shines a glimmer of understanding that there are many beautiful witnesses of people who are suffering and actively choose hope and live joy. To the naked eye it might seem as though they are doing the impossible. And in many ways they are. However, because joy and pleasure are different we can see that joy is plausible in all circumstances. How, though, does one find joy in the midst of truly grievous and sorrowful situations? How do joy and sorrow unite like the vine and the branches?
“We can also understand how the virtues are like the arteries that carry strength and disperse joy throughout the entire organism of the moral life.” (Pinckaers, 80). The fruits of a tree come to be only because they are connected to the vines, which stems from the trunk, which is nourished by the life giving sap running throughout. Similarly, the fruit of joy is possible in the midst of sorrow solely because one is allowing Christ to live within him so that the Holy Spirit runs throughout animating one’s sorrow and transforming it to joy.
It is because of one's relationship with Christ that this is possible. It
is outside the realm of pleasure. Pleasure can’t look at death and see eternal life. Pleasure can’t see sickness and know a renewal of health. Pleasure is fleeting. Joy is rooted and grounded in an eternal love that acknowledges sorrow as a reality but doesn’t give sorrow the final word.
We boldly proclaim that sorrowful joy is a possibility as Christians. It is portrayed in the hope found in Our Lady’s hands as she held the limp, beaten, crucified, and bruised body of Christ. As she mourned the loss of her Son, she entered more deeply into her Motherhood for all of humanity. Her sorrowful heart and her immaculate heart are one as the sorrow and joy of life are found most fully by participating in and holding His Sacred Heart. Is your Joy sufficient? Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things; love never fails. Joy, a fruit of His Love, the Holy Spirit, enables and ennobles our actions so that we might know peace in the midst of the storm as well as the fruitfulness and faithfulness of God.
"Truly, truly, I say to you, that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will grieve, but your grief will be turned into joy. "Whenever a woman is in labor she has pain, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy that a child has been born into the world” (John 16: 20-21)
Verso l’alto,
Kathryn
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness
DRIVE the dark of doubt away
Your love carries me
Out of valleys and the darkest places
Out of valleys and the darkest places
And the foxes in the vineyard will not steal my joy
Because You are good to me, good to me
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