Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice!

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

THAT’S a Responsorial Psalm in one of the Octave Masses of Christmas. It expresses precisely how we should feel now that Christ our Savior is born. We have to learn to be truly be happy, confident and at peace always no matter how things go in our life. The secret is to be always with Christ who makes himself ever available to us.

“Gaudium cum pace.” Joy with peace. This is the ideal condition we have to reach everyday, especially at the end of the day. It is what is proper to us. Without it, we would be miserable creatures, regardless of the riches, power and fame we may have.

As Sacred Scripture would have it, “A merry heart is the true life of man, is an unfailing store of holiness. Length of years is measured by rejoicing.” (Sir 30,23) And St. Thomas Aquinas has this to say apropos: “Happiness is a good proper to human beings. Animals can only be called happy by a misuse of language.”

There are many benefits of joy and peace. The Book of Proverbs says, “A cheerful heart makes a quick recovery. It is crushed spirits that waste a man’s frame.” (17,22) Joy facilitates thinking and reasoning. It helps us to more easily understand people and situations. It fosters simplicity, creates a good atmosphere around, and builds up unity.

We have to make sure that we are happy and at peace. Obviously, we have to understand that to be in that state is first of all a result of grace which we should always ask and pray for. But it is also a product of our own correspondence to God’s grace, and of our effort to follow more closely Christ’s teaching and example.

The joy and peace rooted on Christ transcend the physical and earthly dimensions. They can be lived even in what may be considered humanly speaking as difficult moments of pain, suffering and privation.

Thus, St. Paul once said: “In all things we suffer tribulation, but we are not distressed. We are sore pressed, but we are not destitute. We endure persecution, but we are not forsaken. We are cast down, but we do not perish. We are always bearing about in our body the dying of Jesus so that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodily frame.” (2 Cor 4,8-10)

We need to go theological to attain this state of joy and peace. We cannot rely solely on the physical, medical and other worldly elements that go into the making of joy and peace. We need faith. We need to be vitally united with Christ.

We have to see to it that every day, and in fact, in every activity we do during the day, we should always end with a sense of joy, satisfaction and fulfillment, no matter how things went. They can go badly, humanly speaking, but if our sense of joy and peace is theological, we will always find meaning, beauty and purpose in them.

This is crucial because it is joy that keeps us going, that keeps us alive. We may get physically tired, but our spirit would still be vibrant. We can still manage to smile, to be hopeful and positive about things, to be encouraging in our words and deeds.

And all this not because we are inventing things. We are convinced of the solid foundation of our faith that secures and guarantees our conviction about our sense of joy and peace. It’s this conviction that would make us consistently happy in good times and bad times, whether alone or with others.