Living fruitfully joy preview

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Living Fruitfully Joy Learning from the Saints by Mgr Paul Grogan

All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society

CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY publishers to the holy see

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Contents The ‘Knock-On’ Effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Life in the Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Closeness to Jesus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Speaking of Jesus to Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Listening to Jesus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Appendix 1: Examen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Appendix 2: Prayer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

All rights reserved. First published 2017 by The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society 40-46 Harleyford Road London SE11 5AY Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0040 © 2017 The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society.

ISBN 978 1 78469 191 2

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The ‘Knock-On’ Effect

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oy shines forth from the face of a parishioner. She visits the sick, helps people in need in very practical ways, attends Mass frequently and remains for the most part in the background. Although not young, she is tireless. She is always cheerful. Whatever personal crosses she bears, she does not let them get in the way.

Being in the company of such a person gives you a lift. It convinces you of the truth of the gospel and inspires you to seek to be more generous in the living out of your own vocation. This ‘knock-on’ effect within the Church is one of the main ways that God helps each of us to grow in holiness. Joy is contagious.

But what exactly is joy? One answer is that it is simply an intense and positive emotion. It is a heightened form of happiness. As such, joy is certainly very valuable but it is also limited and it does not last.

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Most people sense that there is a deeper joy than this. There is: it is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. God gives this fruit to those who are trying to live their faith seriously. It is God’s own joy. This joy is an expression of the love which lies at the heart of the Blessed Trinity.

God in Jesus invites us to enter into his life, to be his “friends” (Jn 15:15). When we say “yes” and mean it, deep down, joy bursts forth in our hearts, like a flower opening its petals before the bright sun. We discover the purpose of our lives and we are overjoyed. This joy is eternal because, as St Paul notes: “Love does not come to an end” (1 Co 13:8). Joy then, as a fruit of the Holy Spirit, is the keen exaltation that we experience when we perceive that God’s love in Jesus is real, deeply personal and unimaginably great.

In this booklet we will look at the life in the Spirit which makes Christian joy possible and then, drawing on lots of examples of saints, we will consider three ways in which Christians can experience such joy: through remaining close to Jesus (prayer); through speaking of Jesus to others (evangelisation, which means “spreading the gospel”); and through following Jesus (vocation).

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Life in the Spirit

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s Christians we have entered into a new state of existence. Through our Baptism, the Holy Spirit has restored us. It is like we are living in the Garden of Eden again. Joy feels “right”.

St Paul writes “the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rm 5:5). He is referring to the Sacrament of Baptism. He adds that “we are filled with joyful trust in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have already gained our reconciliation” (Rm 5:11).

Joy is God’s gift to us. It is what we experience as God draws us to himself. Now “nothing…can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rm 8:38-9).

How can we enter more deeply into this joyful trust? Through the virtues of faith, hope and charity, St Paul tells us (1 Co 13:13). The Holy Spirit infuses these three dispositions into us.

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If we are to be joyful, it stands to reason that we have to know what we are being joyful about. Our faith tells us that God has saved humanity through the death and Resurrection of his Son. It also tells us that God is with us now in his holy Church. In other words, faith helps us to see both God’s actions in the past and God’s actions in the present. Through the virtue of faith we know that our joy is well-founded.

We grow in this virtue through our sharing in the life of the Church, which is the herald and the guardian of our faith. Through participating in the sacraments our faith comes alive. Through our fellowship with other Christians our faith becomes stronger.

The virtue of hope looks to the future and reinforces the joy which faith has made possible. It helps us to focus on the happiness which is to come. Jesus’s Beatitudes (Mt 5:1-12) help us to understand this virtue. They describe the blessings of the kingdom of heaven as already existing whilst pointing to a fulfilment of them in the future. Jesus says: “How blessed are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven; Blessed the gentle; they shall have the earth for their heritage.” In the person of Jesus the joy of heaven is breaking into the earthly realm just as in him God has entered into humanity. Although we remain mortal, we possess something eternal, namely divine joy.

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The Virtue of Christian Hope At the end of the Beatitudes Jesus says: “Blessed are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account.

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven; this is how they persecuted the prophets before you.” Through the virtue of Christian hope, two things can be held together which we would ordinarily assume are completely opposite to one another: joy and suffering. St Teresa of Avila notes that the virtue of hope helps us to embrace trials because each becomes a proof of our love for God: “Hope, O my soul, hope… Dream that the more you struggle, the more you prove the love that you bear your God, and the more you will rejoice one day with your Beloved, in a happiness and rapture that can never end” (Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) 1821).

God does not merely offer us this joy. “God calls us to his own beatitude.” (CCC 1719). He wants us to be joyful more than we can imagine! Beatitude is that state of blessedness of those who in Christ have received the gift of eternal life in his Church. We discover in faith that true happiness is found in God alone (CCC 1723).

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Such hope-filled Christian joy is very different from what we might term natural optimism. If I am optimistic, I am relying on a guess, perhaps an educated one, that in all probability the good outcome which I desire will materialise. I do not have a guarantee that this will be so, however. Also, on the basis of optimism alone, I cannot appreciate the fullness of the good which God intends I should enjoy. My hopes are necessarily very limited. I can be optimistic that I might experience life after death but I cannot begin to understand what that might be like. Moreover, if I just rely on optimism, how can I deal with suffering which seems to undermine my sunny expectations?

By contrast, Christian hope, based on Christian faith, informs me that the good thing that I desire has already happened: Christ has risen from the dead. It provides me with a guarantee that if I access God’s mercy I can experience the joy of eternal life with Christ. It helps me to understand that suffering and death do not rob me of joy because for me joy is not merely a positive emotion which can be displaced by negative ones but a settled attribute in my soul.

Christian joy is proof against the problems of life.

If Christian joy is based on faith and lived in hope it comes to fruition in the greatest of the theological virtues, charity. This is the disposition “by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our

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neighbour as ourselves for the love of God” (CCC 1822).

Charity is friendship with God. This friendship has a fruit: joy. Whereas other friendships can disappoint us, this one never can because God has bound himself to us forever in the death and Resurrection of Jesus.

Friendship with God It was at the Last Supper that Jesus invited us to enter into the joy of his friendship. He said to his apostles: “I am the true vine and my Father is the vinedresser” and he described his apostles as branches who “bear fruit” through being connected to him and who would die were they to become separated from him. He assured them that as his Father loved him so he loved them and he urged them to “remain” in his love by keeping the commandments. He then said: “I have told you this so that my own joy may be in you and your joy be complete.” Afterwards he urged them to love each other as he had loved them and pointed towards his forthcoming death when he said that the highest form of love is to “lay down” one’s life for one’s friends. He concluded by telling the apostles that he had chosen and commissioned them “to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last” (Jn 15:1-16).

In this speech Jesus refers to three key acts of charity which bring us joy. The first is the act of remaining close to him. We are the branches; he is the vine.

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We draw eternal life from our Risen Saviour through the action of the Holy Spirit who unites us with him.

We do this through participating in the life of the Church and especially through worship.

The image of the vine points to the Church. The prophet Isaiah likens the People of God to a vineyard (Is 5:1-7) and the prophet Jeremiah likens them to a “choice vine” (Jr 2:21). Jesus is creating the new People of God based not on the twelve tribes of Israel but on the twelve apostles whom he is addressing. The image of the vine also points to the mystery of the Mass through which the Church celebrates her communion with her Lord. This Eucharist is the “sacrament of charity” which fortifies us to love as Jesus loved.

The second act of charity is speaking about Jesus to others. Jesus tells his apostles that they are to “go out” and bear fruit. They are to share their faith with others.

By engaging in such evangelisation the apostles will be obeying Jesus’s commandment: “Love one another.”

Pope Emeritus Benedict reminded us in the 2013 Lent Message: …the greatest work of charity is evangelisation, which is the “ministry of the word”. There is no action more beneficial – and therefore more charitable – towards one’s neighbour than to break the bread of the word of God, to share with him

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the Good News of the Gospel, to introduce him to a relationship with God….

The act of sharing our joy as believers with others reinforces that joy and protects us from focusing too much on ourselves.

The third act of charity is living out faithfully our personal vocations in the Church. Jesus tells us: “You did not choose me, no I chose you.” Each vocation offers particular opportunities for charity and hence for joy. A priest finds joy in exercising “pastoral charity”.

A married couple find joy through wholehearted participation in their “communion of life and love”. A single person finds joy through service of others.

Experiencing Complete Joy If charity, lived out in these different ways, is the first gift of the Holy Spirit to believers (CCC 733), the same Holy Spirit gives us different gifts, seven of them, to help us to be docile to his prompting in our hearts.

They are: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord. They complete and perfect the virtues of those who receive them (CCC 1831). In addition there are the fruits of the Holy Spirit with which this series of booklets is concerned. The tradition of the Church lists twelve of them: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control and

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chastity. These fruits are “perfections that the Holy Spirit forms in us as the first fruits of eternal glory” (CCC 1832).

The fruit of joy, then, like the other fruits, is the work of the Holy Spirit in us. We do not experience joy haphazardly. The Spirit deliberately causes this fruit to mature within us. It is a sign that the Holy Spirit is changing us within through grace. We call this process personal conversion. It is the means by which we become more perfectly human. St Paul likens what happens in the heart of a disciple of Jesus to what happened to Moses whose face shone with an ethereal brightness after he had encountered God on the mountain top: “…and all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Co 3:18).

This process, though a joyful one, can also be a painful one. We recall, for example, how Jesus said the night before he died: “Now, Father, it is time for you to glorify me with that glory I had with you before ever the world was.” (Jn 16:5) The glory which the fruits of the Holy Spirit point towards is the glory of laying down our lives for others in charity in imitation of our Crucified Lord.

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Jesus, who loved us to the end, is the perfect man.

He possessed all the fruits of the Holy Spirit in untold abundance. As the fruits of the Holy Spirit mature in us then, we become more like Jesus. We enter into the fullness of our humanity. The fact that there are twelve fruits is significant. In the Jewish mind-set, the number twelve indicates wholeness, completeness (hence the twelve tribes of Israel). This reminds us that the fruits of the Holy Spirit are all evident in somebody who is being transformed by grace. One could not experience joy if one were seriously lacking in self-control, for example. Nor is it surprising that the joyful person is invariably also gentle, patient and modest.

It is also significant that charity and joy are listed first among the twelve. Charity is the eternal life of the Blessed Trinity and joy is that sense of exaltation which we experience when we live in charity. The other fruits are consequences of our entry into this eternal life. Joy indeed belongs to heaven whereas other fruits, such as chastity, clearly have relevance only in these “end times� before Christ comes again.

Complete joy is what we will experience when we will join the angels and the saints in praising God throughout all eternity.

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