“Divine joy is a delicate thing which is given only to the single-hearted.”
Bernard of Clairvaux
Life tends to bleed the joy out of us, and it can rob us of the habit of hope. We have to insist, as a discipline, that life, not only because it is a gift from God but also because it is a constant invitation to know, in an infinity of ways, the love of God, is seeded with joy.
Our job is to learn how to engage life the way that we would eat a pomegranate, so that the seeds of joy break forth in our mouth, in our hearts, in our ways of interacting with other. Our dedication to that way of life allows us to participate in God’s love coming more alive in our world.
As Pope Francis suggests, joy adapts and changes. We know joy in a variety of ways over the course of our lives; but the root of it is beyond us and beyond our personal circumstances. Joy is rooted in God, because it is rooted in love. Joy, Pope Francis says, “always endures, even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.” (Joy of the Gospel, par. 6)
How would our world be different if we constantly acted out of “our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved”?