Finding and Keeping Joy

God wants to give everyone, all over the world, a joyful heart, even is this difficult and busy world. Our joy can be transcendent. Our joy can stay with us no matter what is happening around us.

We have to live our lives. We have many things that need our care. God knows that. God put us in this world to find Him, and He knows that it is hard. Since we find it hard to come to Him, He comes to us. And He wants to stay with us.

Give yourself a chance to be filled with joy.

written by Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael

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The feast of St. Francis of Assisi

There is... and I have read about this numerous times... there is a real disadvantage to us as people striving to become holy, to live in the United States.  There are so many things… things.. and I mean literally things that act as barriers to us to become closer to God.

There are the barriers of:  Do I have a nice place to live?  Do I have a nice car?  Is my hair done prettily? If I don't have hair, that doesn't really matter?  Am I what society wants me to be?  Do I have all the trappings?  Am I powerful?  Am I important?  Am I... whatever?

And these are all barriers.  And I read an article one time, maybe several times, that I really found absolutely fascinating.  They were saying, they were talking about sub-Saharan Africa which is much in my mind these days for other reasons.  Did you know that there are 1.2 billion people in the world who have no electricity whatever?  And 600 million are in sub-Saharan Africa. No electricity.  None.  Zero. 

That there are 600 thousand people a year, half of them children, who die because of the fires that they build inside their houses to cook… and they die of carbon monoxide poisoning.  Three hundred thousand babies die.

Yet the faith that we find in the Catholic Church in Africa is so incredible.  They talk about the fact that if you go to Africa, especially if you participate in religious services there, you are going to walk out with a smile on your face.  You are going to be filled with the joy of God.

A few weeks ago I got a chance to meet some of the Francophones (French-speaking people), Catholics from all over the world, who had a charismatic meeting here at Mary Immaculate Church.  Wonderful people.  The one thing you couldn't get them to do is stop smiling.  And this is very much in keeping with what St. Francis tells us.  That we have all these barriers, and we walk around and we say, "Oh what is the meaning of the world!"?  And we have all these barriers that keep us from Christ.  Yet the poor don't have those barriers.  And we frown and they smile.  Because they are closer to God.  And we have to listen to St. Francis. We have to go to an affirmative action on our part to say, "Okay, let me catalogue all the things in my life that I think are important that are keeping me from God.  And I have to make an effort to make them less important than they would be otherwise.  So they are no longer a barrier.  Because once we allow ourselves to strip ourselves of all the external trappings that keep us from God, all of the sudden we are filled with joy.

That's one of the things St. Francis was so known for, is the poverty of stripping away everything.  The young man to whom Jesus said, "Give away everything because you are not ready to follow me."  St. Francis did it.

We had the readings a couple of day ago, you know, let the dead bury the dead.  What he is saying is, "Strip away all of those things.  Because once you get to the core of where you are and remove the impediments of coming to Christ, these barriers that we have in our normal lives, all of a sudden, you are filled with joy.  All of a sudden you begin to understand what it means to be a child of God.

And frankly, I first experienced this at Parkland Hospital.  I've talked to you about Parkland Hospital frequently.  I go to Parkland Hospital, I'm a... frankly I am a rich lawyer.  North Dallas.  I walk into Parkland Hospital...nothing but poor people.  I walk into Parkland Hospital and go into Palliative Care.  Nothing other than poor people who are dying.  And the ones who are the closest to death, who have lost everything, had little to begin with and have lost everything because they are going to be dying in a very short period of time, they are full of joy.

The one way I could tell whether someone was reconciled to their dying is that it wasn't, "Oh yeah, I am reconciled. I am ready to see God."  No, it was something totally different.  It was, "I am worried about my nephew.”  “I am worried about what I can do to take care of someone else.  My situation doesn't matter." 

What is important is love.  Love of God and love of neighbor.  Those are so simple, so simplistic that when we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by all the things in this world:  "Oh, am I important enough?  Is my hair in place because there was a breeze out there.  Am I going to hit the right note when I start singing."  Which I never do.  Hit the right note, that is.  All those trappings are keeping us away from God.

And in our part, we have to make a conscious effort to put it aside.  To say, "That is not important to me."  What is important is what Paul talks about.  Christ crucified.  Christ who died on His cross.  To follow the example of Christ. How can you be stripped of anything more than He was.  His friends were gone.  He was beaten to a pulp.  He was humiliated in public.  He was spat upon.  He was in pain, and he was crucified.  Yet in there St. Francis finds joy.  And in there we have the joy of our Lord Jesus Christ and God, waiting for us.  All we have to do is come, and listen to his voice and to follow the example of St. Francis.

October 4, 2018 2