What happy circumstance to find a kindred spirit of bookish bent. Having found someone who shares passages from beloved books that you also enjoy greatly, you are guaranteed to find more gems from being in their presence. While I continue to chew on a thoughtful passage offered some months ago, which I have not been able to track down through the marvels of the internet, the thoughtful reader offered another, which I did find.
From remarks offered by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom London Group of the Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius and their friends on Saturday, 17 February 1968, and later written, revised, and published, comes this perspective on Lent:
Contrary to what many think or feel, Lent is a time of joy. It is a time when we come back to life. It is a time when we shake off what is bad and dead in us in order to become able to live, to live with all the vastness, all the depth, and all the intensity to which we are called. Unless we understand this quality of joy in Lent, we will make of it a monstrous caricature, a time when in God’s own name we make our life a misery. This notion of joy connected with effort, with ascetical endeavour, with strenuous effort may indeed seem strange, and yet it runs through the whole of our spiritual life, through the life of the Church and the life of the Gospel.
The concurrent experience of joy and suffering is perhaps not something that can be conveyed on the page; perhaps it must be experienced to be believed. So much of our life can be frittered away in trying to be comfortable, to feel good, to be at peace with ourselves and those around us. And yet, when we pursue what is excellent, when we strive for ideals, we can find in that discomfort and inevitable shortcoming, a sustained joy.
Carrie Gress writes memorably about this topic. After the birth of her third child, she was squeezed between the increasing demands of young children and finishing her dissertation. In the experience of exhaustion and fatigue, she notice the dawning of another state: joy. She explains:
At first, I thought it must just be a byproduct of exhaustion or too much coffee, but it didn’t wane and wax with fatigue levels. It was just a new constant sense. Yes, I was all these things that most people wouldn’t associate with joy and happiness, but there it was. Joy. It was the fruit of giving myself in the most vital sorts of ways. And not just a little. I was giving everything I had. Pouring out every ounce for my children, my husband, and in the intellectual work that God had placed before me. I felt a deep sense of purpose—and the goodness of that purpose—in who I was and what I was doing, even in the very mundane tasks that filled my day. They became less bothersome as I focused on the bigger picture of what was happening in our home. My joy, however, wasn’t in spite of suffering. It emerged because of it.
On the precipice of Lent, it can be tempting to hold back, to resist a time of suffering and purification. And yet, if we think that a life of suffering is not for us, we fail to see the world for what it is: a valley of unavoidable suffering. We will all see every person we love die or predecease them ourselves, often through illness and pain. There is suffering, and we cannot avoid it. How it gladdens the heart to know that suffering is not opposed to our ultimate happiness. Through suffering, in the mystery of that paradox of both/and, we find our greatest joy.
Fittingly, the mundane and work-filled subject of the painting above, by Jozef Israëls, is titled “The Joy of Motherhood.” Ours is an age that would see that description as ironic, but it remains true for those who have found great joy.
