Joy as Rest

A sobering article entitled Death by Loneliness documented that people are committing suicide and mass murders at an alarming rate because people are missing four essential ingredients to happiness: Family, friends, relationship with God that also gives meaning and purpose to suffering and finally, meaningful work. Meaningful work and a sense of achievement are vital to happiness. But production and achievement alone are insufficient. We also need joy, we need to delight in, rest in the work we have done. I love an arduous hike through the woods and up the mountain. But I am frustrated if I can’t get above tree-line, reach the summit and delight or rest in the 360-degree view that makes me realize, life is bigger than my projects or problems – life is really good. To be happy we need both the arduous work and the rest or the delight in the accomplishment of the work. In todays meditation we focus on joy and delight.  The power of the soul called the Passions are the good God-given emotions or desires designed to propel us toward good and away from evil. There are 11 fundamental passions: Love, Desire, Joy, Hate, Aversion, Sorrow, Hope, Despair, Fear, Courage, Anger. All the passions except one, prompt us to move. The single exception is joy. Joy may motivate action by its absence – when once you’ve tasted joy, you’ll do an awful lot to get it back again – but when joy is present its only demand is that you rest. Joy is the response to something experienced as good, and it invites repose in that good. We are missing out if we do not learn to delight or rest in a job well-done. We were made for joy, not for sorrow. We have the capacity for delight so that we can rest in the good, and perfect rest in the perfect good – perfect delight – is the ultimate purpose of human existence. Heaven, the ultimate joy, is also described by the fourth chapter of Hebrews as simply entering into God’s rest. So if you can’t rest, how are you going to enter heaven?   The Discipline of Rest. What makes joy distinctive is that it prompts us to rest in the good. If we refuse to rest, or if we’re incapable of it, delight will be frustrated. Rest and joy go together. The first condition for delight is rest. St. Paul VI, in his exhortation on Christian Joy, worries that for many, “The burden of their charges, in a fast-moving world, too often prevents them from enjoying daily joys.” When there’s so much to do, so much to get done, people run the risk of failing in the core responsibility of delight. Rest and joy are an obligation, specified in the third commandment. Apparently rest is so foreign, so unlikely for human beings to pursue on their own, that God needs to give us a direct order to take some time every week and prepare for heaven by resting with Him. If left to themselves, people will prefer the merciless yoke of productivity to the joy of the Lord.  The Sabbath frees us from that yoke, it reminds us that we were made for God’s delight and not for work’s anxiety. “Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28). The Catechism beautifully describes the Sabbath as “a day of protest against the servility of work.”  Isn’t that beautiful? If you can’t say no to work, then you are a slave. Resting on Sunday is a revolution, it’s a weekly overthrow of the usurping tyrant of getting stuff done. Like sorrow, work is good in itself, and part of the human condition. But in the long run, our final purpose isn’t for sorrow, and it isn’t for work. We were made for rest and delight. In the book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper says, we should treat rest and joy, not work, as the goal of life. Many people treat Sunday just as a “recharging the batteries,” or getting “reenergized.” As though spending time with God, thinking about Him and delighting in all He has done, were just a kind of fueling up so that we could get back to the “real business” of life!