Is there any joy like
seeing a smile on the face of someone you love?
And what makes us smile, but joy?
So, the mathematician in me wants to create a simple equation here: joy
+ love = more joy! Love is the catalyst
that helps joy reproduce, that leavens it and produces a chain reaction of joy
begetting joy. And the ultimate source
of love in the world is God who is love, who expressed that love most supremely
in the coming of Jesus Christ. Forget
the math if it doesn’t help: Pope Francis traced out this connection with a
simple phrase in his recent exhortation: “With Christ, joy is constantly born
anew.”
That’s
the optimistic, explosive, contagious view of joy and love we need, to approach
First John, a letter we’ll read from often as we continue our celebration of
the Christmas season at daily Mass. We
just read the first four verses, an excited proem to the whole work. It’s from a ‘we’ (not an ‘I’; “we have
written” this, it says) – it’s from not an individual, but a community that has
fellowship, koinonia, that has love-based
communion with each other and wants to have it with their readers, their
unnamed ‘you,’ a ‘you’ that we can understand as directed to ‘us.’ It’s a letter written from lovers out of love
to beloved ones, that love might spread, the Love that God is.
And the
lovers write, we read, because that’s the only way their joy can be
complete. The cup cannot but run over
when it’s full of the joy of hearing, seeing and touching the Word of Life,
such tangible language!, appropriate for a word that’s very close to us, that’s
encountered in the messy humdrum commonplaces of life, in the beauty of nature,
the laughter of a child, the kindness of strangers, in the good that the joyful
are attuned to see.
God
reveals Himself to us in very real, tangible ways. Let’s be excited about that. Let’s rejoice in that, and may our rejoicing
lovingly spread.
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