The Struggle to be Joyful

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I recall that in my teens I read about Los Penitentes, a secretive group of Catholics in New Mexico and southern Colorado who engage in self-flagellation. Happily, the priests and nuns I knew disapproved of this practice.

But according to the web site of the Denver Public Library, the groups still exist and still engage in self-flagellation. That means they whip themselves as a form of penance and engage in other penitential rituals that most modern people would find abhorrent.

In the recent past, self-flagellation was often practiced in monasteries and convents, but most religious orders no longer permit it. And with good reason. Doing penance, such as during Lent, has been a part of Christian practice from the beginning, but Christian theology has condemned self-mutilation of any kind.

Religious Fanaticism?

And whipping yourself, in my view, is an extreme form of penance and rightly classified as self-mutilation, or even "religious fanaticism."

Fact is, life already has its fill of suffering. You don’t have to manufacture ways we can be hurt and feel pain. The challenge, in my view, is how to handle suffering and even be joyful in its face.

John Stanczak, author of the book, "The Science and Spirit of Joy: Positive Psychology Meets Catholic Happiness," wrote about the topic in a recent issue of America Magazine in an article called “Crucified Joy.”

He lists two temptations Christians should resist in the effort to be joyful: sentimentality, embracing the idea of joy so forcefully that it becomes unreal, with an unwillingness to acknowledge one’s suffering and the suffering of others; and cynicism, “a posture that treats talk of joy as naïve, a religious gloss that obscures the world as it really is.”

John Stanczak
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The Christian must be honest about suffering “without giving suffering the final word,” he writes. And joy “must be sturdy enough to survive real life.”

Feelings, as I’ve mentioned before in these blogs, are unreliable. And feeling good about oneself and others, and the state of the world, comes and goes.

As Stanczak puts it: “Life grows complicated. Spiritual desolation arrives – dryness, heaviness, agitation, the sense that prayer is empty or that God is distant” or non-existent.

“Many Catholics have been formed – sometimes by family culture, sometimes by religious culture – to equate holiness with emotional tidiness: being calm, controlled, ‘fine.’” Stanczak contrasts this idea with the psalms, the 150 poems and songs that make up the book of the same name in the Bible.

The psalms, he writes, “sanctify lament. They teach that suffering does not disqualify a person from prayer; it may become the very place where prayer becomes honest.”

After praising God for his “steadfast love and faithfulness,” for instance, the author of Psalm 115 laments that he lives in a secular, even atheistic world and asks, “Why should the nations (whose meaning in the Bible can be “pagans”) say, ‘Where is your God?’”

Steadfast Love

And exhibiting his angst about life and its pull to conform to the world, the author of Psalm 130 turns to the Lord in desolation: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!” Then, he exhibits his joy by reciting, “O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord is steadfast love….”

No, joy is not a feeling. It’s confidence that God is with us despite our suffering, the sorry state of the world, and our doubt.  

Christianity’s answer to pain, writes Stanczak, “is not finally an explanation but a presence. The cross is the claim that God is not a spectator to human pain,” evoking the prayer, “I do not understand, but I am not alone.”