Saturday, November 10, 2012

Building and defending joy


THAT’S what we all long and yearn. We want to be happy. Glee and bliss
are the unspoken ultimate goal we want to attain. But how should we do
it? That’s the problem.

Especially now when we are bombarded with all sorts of trials,
challenges, pressures, we end up harassed, losing joy and peace easily
and for extended periods, reacting to things with tension and
irritation, and often plunging into despair and depression.

In reaction to this predicament, many people resort to deceptive
quick-fixes and other forms of escapism—alcohol, drugs, sex, isolation
or wild lifestyle—not knowing they are just poising themselves for an
uglier crash.

We need to clarify some basic issues here, since we seem to be in the
middle of a thickening confusion and drifting to a kind of hell on
earth. Mental cases are piling up, some studies report, indicating
many people do not anymore know how to cope with their situation.

Dysfunctionality now characterizes not only many individuals but also
families, collective systems and societies. This is the big challenge
we have today and we just have to grapple with it, no matter what it
costs.

We are made and wired for joy. Our problem is that we often ground our
sense of joy wrongly. Instead of hitching it on the genuine origin of
joy who is God, we attach it to something else.

We can say that the crisis of joy and peace in the world reflects the
deeper crisis involving faith. Many people have lost their sense of
God, their faith nothing more than what bodily pleasure and forms of
worldly fulfillment can give.

There are those who restrict their sense of joy in the emotional level
alone, or in physical or mental health, or in money, power and fame.
It’s a very unrealistic sense of joy that cannot cope with the
realities of life.

It’s a sense of joy that definitely cannot explain the meaning and
derive any good from the unavoidable suffering we can face in life,
the possible misfortunes and the sure death that will come.

And when some success or good fortune comes, then that wrongly-based
sense of joy would not know either how to handle such situation. It
tends to get spoiled and easily fall for vanity and pride. It would
just get more complicated.

We need to shout to the four winds that joy can only come from God,
from loving him, following his will and commandments, and entering
into such an ever-growing intimate relationship with him that we could
clearly and promptly see his abiding interventions in our life.

This is a truth that has to be released from our man-made prison of
ignorance, biases and malice. We need to break down the modern walls
of secularism, materialism and relativism that detach us from God and
have simply hardened our self-centeredness.

The joy that is rooted on our faith in God springs from our conviction
that God is our Creator and Father, the source of all good things,
including the essential mercy that we all need since we cannot help
but fall into sin and some trouble.

God never fails us. And nothing is impossible with him. Besides, even
in our wretched condition as sinners, God continues to love us not
only sentimentally, but also most thoroughly by assuming our own
sinfulness without committing sin, and converting our wounded
condition into a means for our perfection and salvation.

This is a truth that we need to process and assimilate well, because
this contains the very germ of the reason why we can afford to be
happy even in the midst of our most grievous predicament.

God, in Christ and now in the Church, only asks us to have faith which
is also what we are made for. We are not simply meant to think and
reason out, much less to feel only.

Whether we like it or not, aware of it or not, we always fall into
some mode of faith, because the reality of things simply demand us to
believe more than just to use our reason.

There are things that we accept not so much because we understand them
as because we simply like to accept them on the basis of our trust in
those who present them to us.

If we have trust in God and not just in some worldly or human
authority, then we open ourselves to an abiding sense of joy and
peace, confidence and security that can only come from an infinite God
who loves us no end.

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