Readings: Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12a
In the late 19th century
the French Catholic writer Léon Bloy
concluded his novel The Woman Who Was Poor
with the line,
“There is only one sadness…
not to be saints.”
But, we might ask,
why should not being saints make us sad
and why would he say
that this is the only sadness?
After all,
isn’t there plenty of other sadness in life—
disappointments in our careers
and creative endeavors,
our love lives
and our friendships:
promotions and recognitions passed over,
failures and broken promises.
Moreover, we do not tend to think of saints
as people who had lots of fun.
Indeed, we tend to think of them
as having become saints
because they were willing to give up
fun things that make people happy,
like money or sex or careers
or, in the case of martyrs, even their lives.
Being a saint sounds to many of us
like a pretty dreary affair—
lots of church and Bible-reading and visiting the sick—
and Jesus in today’s Gospel doesn’t help matters much
when he says that those who are blessed
(which is another way of saying those who are saints)
are the poor in spirit,
the mourning,
those hungering and thirsting for justice,
those who are persecuted for justice’s sake.
This does not sound
like a particularly happy crowd.
We might even ask,
with all due respect to Monsieur Bloy:
given all the potential occasions
for sadness in life,
why increase our sadness
by the pursuit of joyless sainthood?
I probably do not need to tell you
that I think such a view
profoundly misunderstands
both happiness and sainthood.
So, what is happiness?
Our deepest experiences of joy
are when we are doing something and say
“This, this, is what I am meant to be doing.”
We experience joy when we are engaged in some activity
that is so in tune with who we are
that it flows forth from us
with a sense of rightness,
a sense of naturalness,
a sense that this is what we were made to do,
this is who we were meant to be.
It might be joy that we feel in a career,
in which our own particular set of skills and gifts
perfectly match the meaningful task we have to do.
It might be the joy we feel in athletic
or creative pursuits,
when hours spent on the practice field
or in the studio
or at the writer’s desk
yield that moment of victory,
of achievement,
of beauty.
It might be joy that we feel
in friendship or romance,
when the love that we offer
is returned in kind.
But nobody’s life is only their career
or their art
or even their loves.
Our life as human beings is in part distinctive
because we are many things at the same time:
we are doctors or business people or teachers,
while we are also artists and athletes ,
as well as parents and spouses and friends and siblings.
Because we are many things at once,
we find happiness in many areas of our lives.
But we also find sadness,
because the activities that fulfill us
in one area of our lives
might be in conflict with finding joy
in another area of our lives,
as when pursuit of a career
negatively affects our personal relationships,
or we give up our artistic dreams
in order to help provide for our families.
It seems that none of these things
makes us happy in all that we are;
each happiness is a partial happiness.
And even more, we human beings are aware
that each and every partial joy we experience in life
is fleeting,
temporary,
and so fragile
that a small turn of fortune
could take it from us.
An economic downturn
makes me lose that perfect job;
my strength diminishes,
my hands shake,
my mind grows dim,
and I can no longer engage
in my beloved athletic or artistic pursuit;
death or betrayal takes from me
that precious friend or lover.
Part of what it means to be human
is to recognize all this,
and even in moments of intense happiness
to be haunted by the question,
is there something more?
Is there a happiness
that can embrace all that I am?
Is there a happiness
that neither fortune
nor time
nor even death
can sweep away?
There is only one sadness—not to be saints.
Because it is precisely in loving the creator of all,
the one who knows us better than we know ourselves,
that the saints are fulfilled in such a way
that joy can pervade every aspect of their life.
There is only one sadness—not to be saints.
Because the saints are those who have found a joy
that no passage of time or turn of fortune,
no human failure or inadequacy,
and not even death,
can take from them.
Perhaps the life of the saints
strikes us as a sad one
because our notion of “a saint”
is a narrow and moralistic one.
But the saints are not those
who have followed all the rules;
they are not the ones
who have sacrificed all pleasure;
they are not the ones
who have cut out of their lives
everything and everyone except God.
No, they are the ones
who have abandoned themselves
to the wild adventure of being a lover of Jesus,
and have let the joy of that adventure
flow from them
to pervade their every action,
have let that love
infuse all of their relationships.
They are the ones who have found an eternal happiness
that can console us now
in the face of misfortune and disappointment,
and will one day
wipe away every tear in God’s kingdom.
To miss that love,
to miss that joy,
to miss that adventure:
truly, this is the only sadness
that God’s joy cannot overcome.
