What is “gaudete” or joy?
To appreciate joy, which is a spiritual fruit of the Holy Spirit, we ought to look at the theological virtue of hope. Just as well that we are inching towards the conclusion of the Jubilee Year of Hope. Many have visited this Cathedral or St Louis in Kluang and St Mary in Air Salak as pilgrims of hope. What does it mean to be a pilgrim of hope or to be hopeful?
The answer to what hope is will definitely determine how we rejoice. To be truly joyful, hope is necessary because only hope can provide the space that “dares” to rejoice. In our experiences, it is not difficult to confuse hope with optimism. Hope is not and it cannot be false optimism. What hope does is to root our confidence in the promise of God. Whereas optimism on the other hand expects a positive future that is usually secured through self-reliance and if we were religious enough, we may just dress optimism up in the religious language of hope. Optimism believes that divine intervention will somehow grant us what we desire. It is as if God serves a purpose which is to give us what we want. However, optimism, in desiring a brighter future, can make a person ignore the present. An example is when a marketing director, in the face of a market collapse, is optimistic about the future because he or she bases that confidence on a positive forecast.
Hope, on the other hand, does not ignore difficulties but instead is able to endure and persevere because it is born of an encounter with Christ the Lord. It is a deeply theological virtue because it is founded on the relationship with the Risen Christ, an affiliation cemented by prayer and faith. In the context of a connexion with the Lord, what does it mean to have hope and therefore be joyful? For example, what is there to be hopeful of when one is saddled with a retarded child? He will never get better. If anything, living in a techno-efficient world, the child is just a waste of resources. Efficiency, while it is a good value, in the past had also engender the Nazi’s programme of eliminating those who do not fit the narrative of perfection.
The problem with optimism is that it is unable to deal with the failure of a future expectation. Therefore, what answer can we give to those who are “hoping” that their retarded child becomes better? The list goes on. A cancer survivor, in remission, whose case has now become active again. Or someone who sat for an examination in our public service but is continuously defeated by the racial quota.
How can these people live in hope? How is it possible to live with the disappointment that the temporal or near future is not going to be better? And not only to live with the reality of disasters and yet to be joyful.
Hope, even though it is confident of the future, it does not promise a rosy path ahead. Instead the confidence of hope gives us the strength to weather our disappointments. Even though one may be steeped in suffering and yet one is not defeated by it. St Paul in his 2nd Letter to the Corinthians said this: “We are in difficulties on all sides but never cornered; we see no answer to our problems but never despair; we have been persecuted but never deserted; knocked down but never killed”. It is this hope that grants us, not an optimism but rather the perseverance to carry the Cross into a future filled with Christ and His promise of eternal life.
All the longings that we have in our hearts are actually directed to this promise of the future. We seek wholeness, completion and happiness. Between our hunger for happiness and the completion of our longing is an inescapable truth: the lacrimarum valle—the valley of tear. Therefore what hope does is to ground the believer in the certainty that our longing and our desire will not be disappointed because of Christ Jesus who having rose from the death has conquered eternal damnation. In other words, Jesus Christ is the ultimate answer to our longing and because it was, in the first place, put there by Him, He will not frustrate our desire for true happiness but totally fulfil it. That is hope and it is this certainty that gives us joy amidst the struggles of our time.
Finally, language is perhaps instructive. We used to say, “Enjoy yourself” or “Enjoy the cake” or “Enjoy your holiday”. What has happened is that we no longer say it that way. Instead, we just say “Enjoy”. To enjoy oneself, the cakeor the holiday has a sensible connotation to it. We enjoy something as it were, and that is sensible or material. But we have since used the word “enjoy” in itself which has thereby severed the word from its material moorings and perhaps elevated it to a spiritual realm. In other words, we dare to rejoice even when not feeling it or having any sensible attachment to it. Because hopeful joy is born from our encounter with the Risen Christ. His conquest of death gives us the foundation for trusting in God. Such a joy is distinct from fleeting happiness. Without the Risen Christ, we can only rely on optimism because without a life beyond death, we are condemned to search for the resolution of life’s vicissitudes in this temporal realm. Only with the Risen Christ clearly in our mind that we have hope and therefore we dare to rejoice. Hope is founded on Christ who is the reason for the joy that we hold in our hearts. It is the same hope that allowed a prisoner of WWII to scrawl this on a wall: “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when not feeling it. I believe in God even when He is silent”.
