JOY!

“My peace I give unto you, that my joy may be in you and that no one takes away your joy.”

This was the message of peace and the joy of a man who was only a few hours away from facing the greatest humiliation through the most painful deaths.

Almost every Christian in the world is accustomed to read and hear that Christianity is the religion of the cross and suffering because it is the message of renunciation and sacrifice. And as the deepest and most vehement cry of human nature and all beings is the longing for abundant life and perfect joy, few men are willing to embrace the soul of Christianity in all its plenitude, content only with certain external practices. Christianity and joy are two opposite poles for these Christians, eternally incompatible, like darkness and light. Suffering and sacrifice seem to them anti-vital, deeply negative things in its selves since life is essentially an affirmation.

And yet, Jesus asserts that his message to humanity is essentially a message of peace and perfect joy. With it, man faces a difficult mystery, coming to seriously doubt the truth about what the vast majority of humans understand by Christianity.

So long as a profane man does not discover the light of joy through the darkness of suffering, his Christianity is not guaranteed. All that is difficult and sacrificed is, by its very nature, precarious and uncertain - only what is easy, light, and gives pleasure is that it guarantees perpetuity for the unsuspecting man.

Christianity is essentially a message of perfect joy, even in the present life, for it is a joy based on peace. Where there is no deep and solid peace, grounded in truth, there can be no perfect and lasting joy. Under any circumstances, joy cannot be the product of illusion, even if it were the most beautiful illusions.

The joy of the profane man is something merely external, peripheral because it is motivated by objects or external events and can, for this very reason, quickly turns to sadness and despair. Only a joy coming from within man, from the truth of his intimate nature, is that it is solid and indestructible.

If a man is not harmonized with God, he is not harmonized with himself; having any peace, it is impossible to have true joy, for it presupposes peace and harmony. A single degree of joy born of inner peace is worth a thousand times more than a hundred degrees of joy artificially generated by external circumstances.

External pseudo-joy, arising from circumstances independent of man, can be taken away from him because it depends on something that does not depend on him. This joy is not properly his, not born of him, but was added to him unexpectedly, casually, and possibly destroyed by external circumstances.

There is a joy that has not gone through suffering - it is that of the profane, uncertain, mundane, variable, relative, fragmented.

There is suffering that knows no joy - it is that of certain men indulging in spiritual practices, living a contemplative life with mortification of senses, gloomy, pessimistic, sadistic.

And there is a joy born of suffering, quite intense sometimes and deeply comprehended - it is the joy of the Christlike men, who had to suffer all this to enter into his glory.

But it is precisely here where dwells the great mystery, whose comprehension is a spiritual gift of few initiates known by humanity. This Christlike joy is light and luminous, pure, charming; it is an echo of the worlds of God and its angels. When this kind of joy begins to emerge from a man, through his words, his gestures, his acts, his eyes, and above all through his life, the whole world seems to be another, and his soul sings a hymn for having found this defender of the eternal Divinity.

Once a man has savoured this happiness born of redemptive suffering, his joy is perfect, and no one can ever take that joy away from him, for it is the reflection and the melody of his being. This man has conquered the world; he entered into his glory, is definitely redeemed from all the sins of his life. This man has reached a fixed point of support beyond all the vicissitudes of external circumstances of nature and humanity. And he who has found his fixed centre easily and lightly dominates all the floating and shifting peripheries of the external world. Amid a world of profane noises, he dwells in the depths of his great silence. And that silence is strength and firmness, peace and happiness.

There is no doubt that there is a secret relationship of the close affinity between suffering and redemption, supposed that suffering has not caused a man to descend into the negative abyss of bitterness and despair, but in making him rise to the positive zenith of peace and joy.

Joy born of suffering is redemption.

This is the deepest mystery of Christ the Redeemer, which was never explained by any theology; it is the last frontier that man can attain, here on earth, and perhaps on all the other worlds of his evolution.

The telluric cross of Calvary has the lower rod longer because it is still attached to the earth - like painful suffering.

The cosmic cross of Tabor has all four rods of equal sizes because it floats freely in space - like the joy that arose from suffering.

Joy seems to have something profane and impure, and for this reason, certain people who indulge in spiritual practices, leading contemplative life with mortification of the senses, detest it. Still, when joy passes through the fire of suffering, it loses all impurities and leaves entirely sacred, like the light of Divinity.

Once a man has entered this zone of spiritual joy, offspring of redemptive suffering, all things of his material life undergo an inexplicable metamorphosis. There are general purification and enlightenment in all areas of his life.

First, this man no longer needs external impulses to be happy since he possesses perennial joy and happiness.

Secondly, the external world's most insignificant and naive things give him pure, deep, and intense joy. A flower by the roadside, the buzz of an insect, the song of a bird, the smile of a child, the wind rustling the leaves, the white sands of a beach, a friendly word, the beating of a bell in the distance, the radiance of a star. Everything acts upon him as a gentle caress, everything brings fragrances of the Infinite, everything is for him a message of the power and love of God.

“I give you my peace, so that my joy may be in you, and your joy is perfect, and let no one else take your joy from you”. Words like these can only be comprehended in all their intensity, only by a man who discovered the mystery of joy through suffering.

Only this man, fully realized, can be a redeemer for others in need of redemption.