“Rejoice, Jerusalem: and come together all you that love her: rejoice with joy, you that have been in sadness: that you may exult and be filled from the breasts of your consolation.” (Introit for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, cf. Isa 66:10-11)
Laetare Sunday, also known as “Refreshment Sunday” or “Mothering Sunday,” is a day that comes to us in the middle of Lent, both our liturgical Lent and the universal Lent of this time in our history. Are we now asked to rejoice as if there were nothing to weep for? Do we feel like it? Can we raise our heavy spirits on demand to the level of clamorous joy?
Here we have an example of the liturgy calling us to a sentiment we may feel disinclined to embrace. It is an experience of dissonance we may have often during the Divine Office, if we are striving to keep our minds in harmony with our voices, as St Benedict urges. With the Psalms as our seven times a day, seven days a week prayer book, we are exposed to a broad range of human emotions continuously, which may or may not match our personal inner state. Many psalms speak in a frank and evocative way about pain, sickness, fear, grief, abandonment, desolation, anger, vengeance, desire, hope, trust, relief, abundance, joy, and gratitude. What’s more, the individual Psalms are themselves sometimes emotionally complex phenomena. Just think of the classic “Passion Psalm,” which begins, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and continues, “Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.”
“But I am a worm, and not human;
scorned by others, and despised by the people….
Yet it was you who took me from the womb;
you kept me safe on my mother’s breast….
I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax;
it is melted within my breast;
my mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to my jaws;
you lay me in the dust of death….
For he did not despise or abhor
the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him….
All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the Lord;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him.” (Ps 22)
I imagine Jesus praying this Psalm, bowing his head in exhaustion and then raising it in trustful love toward his Father; bowing, and raising, bowing and raising, until the two become a single movement. Desolation and consolation mysteriously coincide.
For me, one of the funniest and most memorable scenes from the Harry Potter books is an exchange in which Hermione tells Harry and Ron at some length about all the different and conflicting feelings another character is experiencing. After a stunned silence, Ron replies: “One person can't feel all that at once, they'd explode,” to which Hermione snaps back: “Just because you’ve got the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn't mean we all have.” Have you ever kept a record of feelings, day by day – just the feelings, without the commentary, so as to track how the mood moves? I have, and it becomes obvious over time that, under normal circumstances my moods are extremely repetitive. Now, I can’t help thinking that, if I were to compose liturgical texts every day according to my moods, I would very quickly find myself circling around the same themes over and over again. Left to myself, my emotional range is not unlike that of a teaspoon. What’s wonderful about the liturgy is that it calls us beyond our sterile cycles to an emotional range as broad and deep as humanity and sanctifies it all under the gaze of God. This is provided, of course, that we are willing to let go of what is only our own, to look deeper and be broadened to embrace what is of others.
As Sr Bonitas mentioned at our chant practice yesterday, today’s chant expresses joy nuanced by sorrow. If we look more closely at the text from the final chapter of Isaiah in its context, we notice that its purpose is the encouragement of those returning from exile to reestablish life in the land. We notice that the sadness referred to in the past tense – “you that have been in sadness” – is not so much a past event as a continuing predicament for those who are faced with rebuilding from scratch what has been lost. We notice that the restoration of Jerusalem evoked as reason to “rejoice with joy” is less a present reality than a promised future event and, as will be discovered in due course, an eschatological promise rather than a historical one. God has pledged to make all things new, in heaven and on earth, not just Jerusalem. So, it is not that we are called to be joyful because sorrow has gone away, but rather that expectant joy comes creeping in even while sorrow is still around.
What is the source of our joy? We have a Father whose love for each one of his creatures is more than we can imagine. We are being drawn daily into ever deeper union with his Son, Jesus, crucified and risen for our salvation. The Holy Spirit lives within each of us, crying out “Abba, Father,” bringing about our full sonship and the transformation of creation. Christian joy is no flight from reality, but flight to the deeper reality of our redemption from sin and death. As St Paul says: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18). “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-9). It is not that sorrow is to be suppressed or forgotten as if unimportant. It is rather to be placed in the broader context in which it belongs. As Sr Hazel mentioned at our schola practice, tristitia or sadness, is bracketed by three forms of joy: laetare, gaudete and exsultetis. No matter how great the sorrow we carry, it is contained, embraced, encompassed and co-suffered by the source of our joy.
So today, on this day of consolation, let us embrace the emotional complexity offered to us by the Scriptures and by the life of faith. Let us hold the sorrow and the joy, the fear and the hope together, turning our eyes now to one, now to the other, and allow them to interpenetrate and be united in a single movement of trustful love. Julian of Norwich, who lived through the devastation wrought by the Black Death, said: “If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”