Joy for July

Today’s reading from Isaiah 66:10-14 imagines God saying, “Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad because of her, all you who love her; exult, exult with her…When you see this, your heart shall rejoice.” Why is the note of joy often sadly missing from some religious celebrations? It permeates the Hebrew scriptures and New Testament, yet “churchy” folks often seem grim. Thomas Merton describes them in Disputed Questions: “the painful coldness and incapacity for love that are sometimes found in groups of men or women most earnestly ‘striving for perfection.’” That phrase may seem dated, but this sounds burningly fresh: “the failures of those who are so sincere, so zealous, and yet frighten people away from Christ by the frozen rigidity and artificiality of their lives.” (p. 124)

Merton goes on to explain that Christ’s call wasn’t meant to be another difficult duty to satisfy the demands of God, but to enter Life, and by loving “be transformed from brightness to brightness.”  As we allow ourselves to be loved, in our limitations and messiness, we “stop being a hair-splitting pharisee,” and become a new reality.

I often find parallels to scripture in literature, this time in re-reading a favorite classic, Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. She recounts the story of Bishop Lamy, with the pseudonym Jean Latour, who as a young man left his home in the beautiful Auvergne region of France to become a missionary in New Mexico. Travel was arduous, living conditions rough, and he often missed his cultured French home. But one achievement of his years on the frontier was building the beautiful cathedral of Santa Fe, dedicated in 1887. As he’s dying, he looks back on his rich, full life. He’d had the chance to retire in France, but opted instead to die in New Mexico. Why? A deep breath of the morning air that restored youth: “the light, dry wind… with the fragrance of hot sun and sage brush and sweet clover … that made one’s body feel light and one’s heart cry, ‘today, today’ like a child’s… (p. 443).  Something soft and wild and free… lightened the heart… and released the spirit into the wind, into the blue and gold into the morning, into the morning!” Or as Merton would say: The mystery of Christ shines forth in our loves, and “we breathe the sweet air of Christ, the breath of Christ.” (p. 126)