The habit of joy

Homily for Gaudete Sunday, 2024

When my wife Suzanne and I became Catholic, we discovered that, while many questions are answered for Catholics by Church teaching, there are still lots of questions that believing Catholics wonder and debate about.

How often should I try to go to confession? Which translation of the Bible should I read? Do I have to call this liturgical color I’m wearing “rose”—or is it okay to call it “pink”? At what point during the Advent season do I decorate for Christmas?

For our family (and this is just my personal opinion) I’ve always considered it important to try to push back on the commercial Christmas season, which seems to start earlier every year, and then ends abruptly on December 25th, just when the liturgical Christmas season is starting. People say “Keep Christ in Christmas,” and for me that starts with keeping Advent in Advent!

Some Catholics like to put up their Christmas tree as early as possible, which is fine—the Vatican’s Christmas tree in St. Peter’s Square has been lit for over a week now! Others like to wait until literally Christmas Eve, and more power to them! With seven kids growing up in our house, we could never have kept them waiting that long—but I’ve also never wanted to decorate the tree too early. Our solution for years has been to buy our tree and decorate it on … this weekend, Gaudete Sunday weekend, when the Church briefly exchanges the purple or violet of Advent for rose or pink in anticipation of the joy of the coming Christmas season.

The Church does the same thing, of course, on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Laetare Sunday—in both cases marking the point at which we’re more than halfway to the celebration to come: the Christmas or Easter season. Both of those Latin words, gaudete and laetare, carry the same essential meaning, which is: “rejoice.”

On these two Sundays out of the year, then, the Church focuses our attention in a special way on something that is true all 52 Sundays and all 365 days of the year: our calling as Christians, in the emphatic, repeated words of St. Paul in today’s second reading, to “Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice!” We see this color just twice a year, but Christian joy is not a twice-a-year thing, or even a Christmas-and-Easter thing. It’s for always. Rejoice always!

Obviously this doesn’t mean dancing through life in a constant state of euphoria! Life’s not like that. Life can be hard in this world, “this valley of tears” as we rightly call it. Even at this time of year … sometimes especially at this time of year. The holidays can be stressful. Every four years it’s compounded by election-year stress; when it gets bad enough, there’s even a clinical name for it: election stress disorder. Right now some people in this part of the country are feeling anxiety over these unexplained drones! And there are plenty of individual sources of stress and anxiety in our lives.

Yet St. Paul, in the second reading, not only says “Rejoice in the Lord always,” he goes on to say: Have no anxiety. At all!

Have no anxiety at all, but in everything,
by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving,
make your requests known to God.
Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding
will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Can it really be that simple? Trust in God, entrust our concerns to him, and all anxiety just goes away and we rejoice always?

We should be clear, first of all, that Paul is not addressing anxiety disorders or clinical depression. We’re talking here about spiritual health, not mental health. The last thing that Catholics with mental health issues need is false guilt over the poisonous idea that if only they were better Catholics, they wouldn’t have those issues. That’s not how it works.

We also need to distinguish between anxiety and stress. Stress is inevitable in this life; anxiety can be overcome. The thing is, both anxiety and joy are habits—and habits take time to form or to break.

The habit of joy, Christian joy, begins with the habit of faith. Of belief that God has created us for joy and intends us for joy—perfect joy in eternal life, but joy also in this life. We rejoice in God because God rejoices in us! That’s the amazing promise of the prophet Zephaniah in the first reading: He starts out:

Shout for joy, O daughter Zion!
Sing joyfully, O Israel!
Be glad and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!

The reading ends with these words:

The LORD, your God, is in your midst,
a mighty savior;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
and renew you in his love,
he will sing joyfully because of you,
as one sings at festivals.

Do we believe that God rejoices over us? If we do, how can we not rejoice in him?

The Mass is a celebration. We are here to celebrate, to rejoice. In a few minutes, as the Liturgy of the Eucharist begins, Father will say to us, “Lift up your hearts!”—and we’ll answer, “We lift them up to the Lord.” Do we? Do we lift our hearts up to the Lord? Do we say it like we mean it? Will we lift up our hearts and voices as we sing the Holy, Holy, Holy, the Lamb of God, and the Great Amen? Will we open our hymnals to sing the hymns as best we can? Is that our habit?

Don’t get me wrong: For some of us, just being here may be all we’ve got; if that’s you, God rejoices that you are here! For all of us, wherever we are, there’s where we are spiritually, and there’s the next step that God waits for us to take. What next step waits for you? What joy awaits you there?