Well, It's Not a Coconut!*

A friend suggested it as a possible topic for a blog post, and I have to admit, I probably would never have thought to write about joy on my own. Even though just seeing the word written there brings a smile to my face and a wave of peace through my heart, I'm not sure I have what it takes to write about it. I am more likely to grumble than to notice opportunities to praise God, and I check my e-mail more often than I pray. Nevertheless, here follow a few of my thoughts on the subject.

Joy.

I can't really say the word  without thinking of St. Seraphim of Sarov. Overflowing with the love of God, he called everyone he encountered "[his] joy," seeing them as they were created to be, icons of Christ Jesus. "On the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit" quotes him as saying, "The Spirit of God fills with joy whatever He touches," and that our joy-filled encounters with the Most Holy Trinity are still merely "foretastes" of the life to come: "...[I]f they fill our souls with such sweetness, well-being, and happiness, what shall we say of that joy which has been prepared in heaven for those who weep here on earth?" He reminds us that there is joy here even in our suffering, and that makes it possible to begin, even now, to live in a place where all sickness, sorrow, and sighing have fled away.

This icon is avaliable for purchase here.

Joy.

In the Holy Gospels, Christ Jesus uses a metaphor to warn his disciples against false prophets; He says that we can identify a tree by its fruit, and that a diseased tree cannot produce healthy fruit. St. Paul echoes this idea in the fifth chapter of his epistle to the Galatians, calling joy a "fruit of the Spirit," visible evidence that a person is working in unison with the Most Holy Trinity. Furthermore, The Precious and Life-giving Cross is often called "tree," not only synechdochially (i.e., because it was made of wood), but also because it is the mystical fulfillment of the prototypical Tree of Life. As Christians, we choose to become grafted into that tree, to be crucified with Christ Jesus; yet, we also will bear its fruit, which is the joy of the Resurrection. If we commend ourselves and all our lives--even (especially) our suffering--to Christ our God, we ought to have that joy always before us. That is how we can "rejoice in the Lord always" (Phil. 4:4).

The Cross as the Tree of Life**

Joy.

One of the greatest blessings of my life has been seeing how joy fills my children. They are all sweet and wonderful creatures, and each of them brings joy to me in their own way, but right now I am thinking especially of my five-year-old daughter, whom I frequently describe as "ebullient." She is almost always smiling, bouncing, giggling, hugging, sharing. (I'm not kidding. She'll even smile and laugh right after she's thrown up.) Especially at church, when she is reverencing the icons and lighting her candles, she can hardly contain herself. It's all she can do not to hop up and down all the way up there and back, with a smile beaming ear-to-ear. Some of that is the energy of a kindergartener, but mostly, I think it's genuine, 100% pure, heavenly joy. She reminds me to look for joy everywhere, even in little things. I forget that every moment can be an offering to God.

What about you--what are your thoughts on joy? Have you ever encountered a truly joyful person? Have you been able to find joy in your suffering? How do you look for joy in your everyday life? I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

*For those of you who have no idea what the title has to do with this post, here's a video.
**This image, found online, is cover art for this book. 

What to Do with our Pain

The online journal my priest kept several years ago has recently been published in book form.  (You can order a copy online at  www.conciliarpress.com/aidans-song.html.)  I used to look forward to reading the new posts every month, and now that I have it in my hands, it is easy to remember why.  There are a couple of passages on suffering that have stood out especially so far. Like this one on the transformation of our sufferings, written on the eve of Theophany (all emphasis in the quotes here is mine):

“In the presence of the Most Holy Trinity, it is always Today; it is always Now. So, in the fullness of time, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit behold the entire history of humanity and my whole life… . But this experience of time’s plentitude doesn’t shield us from pain or sorrow. If anything, pain and sorrow are intensified by this experience…..So the fullness of time is not a refuge. It’s not a pain-free zone that we can step into in order to escape from this life. If anything, it’s where we can take on the full significance of sorrow and the raw agonies of pain. And I think that is one of the greatest gifts we Orthodox can give to the world. We can take upon ourselves all the horrors and heartaches of this world without minimizing any of it, without attempting to explain it away, without holding it at arm’s length through abstraction or argument. We can take it upon ourselves, and we can take it all, through prayer, into the fullness of time, into the presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and it will all be healed. It will all be transformed just as surely as the waters were Today made holy.”

And just precisely how do we do that? Why does he say this is something that Orthodox do? One of the most significant ways we can do this is by praying at the Divine Liturgy. When we step through the doors of the nave, it’s like entering a different time zone. We are stepping into Heavenly Time, the “Today” Father Aidan mentions above. And when we offer to God the Father the fruits of our labors, our crudely transformed version of creation (His wheat in the form of bread, His grapes in the form of wine), The Most Holy Trinity offer them back to us perfectly transformed (the body of Christ Jesus broken for us, His blood shed for us). When we present, through prayer, our hurts and our joys and our despondency and our hopes alongside our gifts at the Divine Liturgy, The Most Holy Trinity transfigures them for us, too; they also become filled with the work of Divine Grace. 

Here is how Father Aidan describes this work in a passage on preparing the gifts:

“Thus, what the offering of bread and wine symbolizes is our opportunity to be united with Christ Jesus in His birth and His death, an opportunity to unite our suffering with His and thereby join with Him in redeeming the world….But the service becomes even more compelling and even more poignant when we begin the commemorations. We pray for hundreds of people at this point in the service, and each time, with each name, as I thrust the spear into the soft crust of the bread, I physically evoke the suffering of our Lord and Master, and I pray that the life of each person may be united with the Life of the One who is ‘alive for evermore and who holds the keys of Death and Hades.’

“But--and this is the most wondrous thing of all--it is precisely through suffering that this union takes place. It’s through our suffering--and there’s hardly anything noble about it. It’s ordinary, everyday misery. A lot of it is self-inflicted; hardly any of it makes sense. But as I remember each person and every situation--the girl who just survived her second suicide attempt, the woman who’s so worried that she’s having trouble sleeping, the man who’s not sure he can continue to stay married, the young man who can’t stop looking at pornography, the woman who’s just now coming to grips with how abusive her mother is; as I place crumb after crumb on the diskos plate--for the woman who isn’t sure how much longer her husband is going to hang around, for the father who is going to be traveling abroad this week, for the widowers who miss their wives, for the grandmother who wonders what will happen to her autistic granddaughter, for the man who’s recovering from a stroke and scared that he’s going to have another one, for the women who have cancer, for the young woman who is waiting for someone to tell her what she does have--all of it is transformed. It’s transformed because it has become an offering, an offering that we make in union with the sacrifice Christ Jesus has made to God the Father on behalf of each of us.


“And through this offering, we are also transformed. Through this offering, we become the Church…And with that, a new creation, an new heaven and a new earth called the Church is present in the world, and Fr. Deacon and I finish the prayers; we bless this new world and offer it back up to the Most Holy Trinity….It’s the same day, but it’s also different. It’s Sunday morning, but it’s also the Eighth Day. It’s Cedar Park, but it’s also the Kingdom of Heaven. Because we are the Church, and the bread and the wine are ready, and we are about to join together in the Great Marriage Supper of the Lamb.”

So if any of you have asked for prayers, know that this is what I mean when I say I will pray for you: Not only will I remember you at home, but I will take your needs with me when I step into the fullness of time at the Divine Liturgy. You are not suffering alone; your pain will be mystically united to the suffering of Christ Jesus, and transformed by His glorious Resurrection.