I Can't Remember the Saint Who Said This, But Fake It Till You Make It

3rd Sunday of Advent

Rejoice always, says St. Paul. Rejoice. Always. I don’t know about you, but I can recall at least three times in my life when I was not rejoicing. Maybe as many as three million times.

What would we need to meet that standard, to rejoice always, no matter the circumstances and tragedies of life?

I want to try to work out an answer to that question from two different perspectives.

The first perspective comes from the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas. He tells us that joy is caused by love. He tells us that when we love a person, our joy comes from being with the person whom we love, or by knowing that the person who whom we love is safe, is doing well, is thriving. When we are separated from a person whom we love, we experience sadness and sorrow. The distance caused by separation hurts us. We possess a desire to be with them once again.

Maybe you will not be surprised to learn that St. Thomas says that the greatest love possible for us is love of God. It is really possible for us to know God and to love God. And because of the reality of the sacraments and the revelation of God in scripture and in the tradition of our Church and in the created world around us, it is really possible for us to be with God all of the time. If we love God and are convicted in our belief that he is present to us by way of sacramental grace and the workings of revelation, then we can live each day united to the one we love. And so now we can rejoice, always.

Obviously, most of us are not rejoicing always. And the absence of joy might reveal one of two problems for us: (1) we might not love God as well as we should, or (2) we might not be convicted in our belief that he is with us always—sometimes we really might think or feel that God is far from us.

What would we need to do, to pull ourselves together to make sure that we really do love God and that we really do believe that God is with us?

The first step would be to learn that love is a matter of attention, intention, choice, and action—not a feeling. Pay attention to God each day. Give him your time. Form the intention each day to grow in relationship with God. Make choices for God, always. Never make choices that separate you from God. Perform actions that give expression to your love and strengthen it—namely, charity. Do the work of love. Each day. Love of God, really, is not all that different from love for any other person. If you pay attention to God, live intentionally in a relationship with God, make choices that bring you closer to God, and give expression to your love through constant works of charity, your love will be sincere.

The second step, I think, is much harder. There is much we can do to love God better. But how do we strengthen our belief that God is with us always by way of the sacraments and the work of revelation? How do we become convicted that we are with the one we love each day, always, and so can always rejoice?

My first answer to that question is about seeing, vision. We can try to see better the work of God in our lives and in the world around us. You can call it getting better with gratitude. You cannot give thanks for a gift you don’t realize you have received, so we need to get better at recognizing the graces and benefits that God constantly shares with us. What we tend to do is spend most of our years seeing only what is wrong, bad, evil—our vision becomes myopic. Or we fall into the trap of believing that we are the cause of what is good in our lives. We have earned, worked for, whatever good things we possess in life, and now all of the sudden the only space left for God in our lives is the working of the miracle we need when we need it and when it does not come our faith weakens.

My recommendation: spend five minutes each night asking yourself where God was during your day. Form a habit of recognizing that God is at work in your life and your job is to find those ways that God as at work and give thanks. Form that habit and you will discover that God is with you.

My second answer to that question—how do we strengthen our belief that God is with us? —is a prayer given to us in the Gospel. ‘Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.’ We need grace in our lives for our belief to become perfected. So, pray for that grace each day. Ask the Lord to close the gap between your understanding and your experience of doubt or anxiety or the feeling that you are distant from God.

There is a second perspective from which I want to work out an answer to the question about how we can rejoice always, no matter the circumstances or tragedies of life.

While love is certainly a cause of joy in our lives, we know on the authority of scripture that there is a second cause of joy that matters just as much for us: living a life in step with the Holy Spirit. Joy, says St. Paul in his Letter to the Galatians, is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. What does he mean? He means that the reality of the Holy Spirit living in us means that we live lives marked by certain kinds of spiritual goods, namely love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The presence of the Holy Spirit in us becomes a cause of these spiritual goods. If those spiritual good are absent in our lives, that might indicate that we have a problem with the Holy Spirit—we aren’t keeping in step with the Holy Spirit, the way St. Paul says we must.

There is an idea I have been working through recently, that the absence of one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit in our lives might reveal to us that one or more of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in our lives has become too weak in us to effect how we live. These gifts of the Holy Spirt are received at baptism—wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, piety, knowledge, and fear of the Lord—and we believe that these gifts are vital for living a good Christian life. Like any gift that comes from God, these gifts of the Holy Spirit need to be cared for, nourished, and strengthened. Failure to care for these gifts would almost certainly have a negative impact on our lives.

Let me get to my point: I think most of us struggle with the gift, the virtue, of fortitude in our lives. Fortitude is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and it is a virtue, a formation of our interior lives, of our free will, that gives us the strength to hold onto what matters the most no matter how hard life gets. Fortitude—call it courage if you like—is not so much about charging out onto the battlefield to do something brave as it is a matter of endurance, of passively clinging to what is good and true and beautiful when life becomes very hard. And a mark of fortitude is patience: the ability to experience suffering and remain joyful, always, because no matter how hard life is, we continue to hold onto what matters the most, holding onto God, holding onto the ones we love, no matter the circumstances and tragedies of life.

So, the absence of joy in our lives—to my mind—reveals an absence of patience. Joy and patience are both fruits of the Holy Spirit, and the absence of these spiritual goods just might indicate that we lack fortitude in our lives. We lack courage. We experience suffering and suddenly it is doubt and anxiety and fear that takes control of us.

If you want to grow in virtue and strengthen a gift of the Holy Spirit, a good place to start, again, is prayer. We started the Advent season by praying together at Mass that the sacramental grace received through the Eucharist would teach us to love more deeply the things of God and hold fast to what endures amid a world that is broken. Make that prayer every day, and then get to work. Hold fast to God. Practice patience, practice joy, even when the truth of your interior life is possessed by doubt and anxiety and fear. I can’t remember the saint who said this, but fake it till you make it. Hold fast to what endures, and then give expression to the fortitude that is in you.

I want to conclude by saying that joy matters a great deal. To begin with, our lives will be very hard and very long without the experience of joy, so if there is joy out there for us to have, we should want it for ourselves. But more important than any of our lives are the lives of those who do not yet know Christ. And authentic Christian joy in a broken world is maybe the best witness we have to the reality of Christ. If we are honest with ourselves, we no longer possess a monopoly on the work of charity, and we’ve never possessed a monopoly on what makes life meaningful. You can be secular and godless in the year 2023—or 2024—and live a life marked by enough love and charity and meaning and value to get by. You won’t flourish without Christ, but you might just get along alright, never knowing what you are missing, never concerned about death and eternal life until it might be too late.

But I am convinced that joy during suffering is a reality that is for Christians only. Joy is maybe our best form of Christian witness. You can’t experience joy while you suffer unless you know Christ and love Christ and are convicted that he is with you always, unless you know that the Holy Spirit lives in you and is for you a source of courage that makes the virtue of fortitude possible and now you can hold onto Christ while you suffer and practice patience and remain joyful always. You can rejoice always.

That kind of joy matters, and the Advent season is given to us so that we can prepare our hearts for joy—the goodness of knowing that because of the child born to us on Christmas morning, we can know God and love God and hold onto God in a broken world and experience the elation that comes from living always with the one we love.

We can rejoice always.

Homily preached on Sunday, December 17th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary