The Face of Mercy / Daniel Conway

Joy and humor are among the best gifts we can offer God

(En Espanol)

At the end of the feature-length documentary Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, the Holy Father encourages everyone who serves God’s people to smile and have a good sense of humor.

Joy “is the best witness we can offer to God’s holy faithful people, whom we are called to serve and accompany on their pilgrimage toward the encounter with the Father,” the pope tells us.

Speaking about the members of religious orders, the pope, who is a member of the Jesuits, says: “The joyful witness of consecrated men and women comes in many forms, especially through a sense of humor.

“It is so sad to see consecrated men and women who have no sense of humor, who take everything seriously,” Pope Francis said. “To be with Jesus is to be joyful; it is also to have the capacity that holiness gives us to have this sense of humor.”

Pope Francis’ various solemn pronouncements have often been named with some variant of joy: from the “Joy of the Gospel” to the “Joy of Love.” Indeed, his apostolic exhortation on the call to holiness in today’s world is aptly titled “Gaudate et Exultate” (“Rejoice and Be Glad”). This underscores the idea that being happy, really happy, is a response to the good news of Jesus Christ.

As St. Matthew tells us, the magi—wise and learned foreigners who searched for Jesus without fully understanding what they were looking for—“rejoiced with exceedingly great joy” (Mt 2:10) when they discovered the star that led them to Bethlehem. There is something about the encounter with Jesus that occasions profound joy.

Not surprisingly, there is a section of the pope’s apostolic exhortation “Gaudate et Exultate” with the subhead “Joy and a Sense of Humor,” where he expands on this idea.

“Far from being timid, morose, acerbic or melancholy, or putting on a dreary face, [the original Spanish uses a term that might well be translated as ‘sourpuss’], the saints are joyful and full of good humor” (#122).

The pope mentions St. Thomas More, St. Vincent de Paul and St. Philip Neri as examples of joyful saints. St. Philip, known as the Apostle of Rome, was a 16th-century priest known for his cheerfulness and jests. His joy was something more than natural gaiety of character, outbursts of humor or vivacity and high spirits. It was something supernatural, and all the people he served were struck by the radiance and exultation which the presence of the Holy Spirit produced in Philip. We are told again and again that Philip Neri was “always joyful, even in his illnesses.”

St. Thomas More, an English Catholic lawyer and martyr, died with a jest on his lips. He told his executioner on the way to the chopping block: “See me safe up; for in coming down, I can shift for myself.”

Pope Francis quotes from a prayer attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas: “Grant me, O Lord, good digestion, and also something to digest. Grant me a healthy body, and the necessary good humor to maintain it. … Grant me, O Lord, a good sense of humor. Allow me the grace to be able to take a joke and to discover in life a bit of joy, and to be able to share it with others.”

Far from being grim or overly serious, the pope tells us, saints are light-hearted and “able to discover in life a bit of joy.” Pope Francis comments, “Hard times may come when the cross casts its shadow, yet nothing can destroy the supernatural joy that adapts and changes, but always endures, even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.”

Christian joy is usually accompanied by a sense of humor. The saints are joyful and full of good humor—far from being sourpusses who put on a dreary face. This is an amazing truth, given what many saints had to endure in their efforts to follow Jesus and care for his wounded and oppressed people.

True joy greatly exceeds the superficial self-gratifications that we pursue in our search for happiness. In fact, the holy women and men we call saints were not engaged in the quest for worldly happiness or self-satisfaction. They freely embraced suffering and hardship for the sake of the Gospel. In return, they were given abundant joy.

To be a saint is to be someone who is close to God. “The closer the Lord is to us,” Pope Francis says, “the more joy we feel; the farther away he is, the more sadness we feel.”
 

(Daniel Conway is a member of The Criterion’s editorial committee.) †