From the Pastor - 'True Joy'

A weekly column by Father George Rutler

The Danaids in Greek lore were fifty young sisters forced into marriage with the sons of Aegyptus, who was the brother of their father Danaus. On their wedding day all of them, save for Hypermnestra, killed their new husbands. The Danaids were slain by the goddess Artemis, the twin of Apollo, and cast into the underworld where forever they were forced to pour water into jars with holes in them.

This was a myth, and the behavior of the Danaid brides is the sort of behavior discouraged in our Pre-Cana programs. But there are many people who would have us spend our days pouring water into leaking vessels. Among them are the “motivational experts” who promise “fulfillment” through vacuous psychology. One after another they are replaced on the lecture circuit with others just as illusory. Nothing can be filled full unless it can be filled in the first place, and to be capable of being filled requires that we know what it means to “be.” That can only be understood by understanding God.

God is the source of all life. The “I AM” requires a total offering of the self in a bond of love. If the self is to become what it was made to be, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut 6:5). When Jesus announced that he is the I AM, he also promised authentic fulfillment: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11).

The inadequacy of many “motivational experts” is rooted in their limited understanding of joy. Only a total offering of the self to God can fulfill human potential and bestow true joy. Those who do accomplish that are saints. The kind of half-hearted “spirituality” which is based on feeling rather than fact, which uses empty words to fill a void in the soul, is a caricature of the true Christianity that saves us from the endless sorrow of trying to fill leaking vessels and never insults our dignity by proposing to make us “feel good about ourselves.”

Golda Meir said, “Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh, either.” The saints weep whole-heartedly for the sorrows of the world with the tears of Christ and, by so doing, they enter into his joy. The word for that fulfillment is “glory,” a word unknown to those who peddle easy prescriptions for ephemeral happiness. “But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2: 7-8).

Fr. George W. Rutler is the pastor of the Church of our Saviour in New York City. His latest book, Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections, is available from Crossroads Publishing.