You can almost touch joy in a Gothic cathedral. That’s what I was thinking as I attended the ordination of Sydney’s newest auxiliary bishop, Tony Percy.
At the Communion, the Ave verum soared up and up and up to the star-coffered ceiling, bursting in fireworks of radiant sound, raining Mozart over the congregation. You could almost hear “the Cherubim and Seraphim crying out to you in endless praise,” as the choir sang in the Te Deum.
Not just the song, but the silence. A thousand people all straining to hear the Mass. Outside, the darkness, the screech of cars and the ringing of mobiles and the thumping rhythms of nightclubs; inside, the mellow light and people of all ages and backgrounds united in silent prayer.
You could almost touch true joy at that Mass. True joy, because it opened up a door to awe, to the divine. I once had an atheist friend who would ask me to invite him to a Mass at St Mary’s to let the transcendent music of its choir wash over him.
You can find it outside cathedrals, of course.
At Hobart Airport I once found myself surrounded by a couple of dozen ladies, apparently South African, singing a hypnotic chant in parts. Some of them were dancing and all were swaying to the rhythm. Every two or three verses girls would begin ululating. They were greeting a couple returning from their honeymoon. The singing grew louder and louder and the ululating more piercing. Most travellers looked embarrassed and stared at the gum blotches on the carpet. To me it was pure joy.
The birth of a child, a wedding, the Milky Way overhead at Uluru, Sarah Brightman singing Pie Jesu. Sometimes, when we least expect it, joy bursts upon us.
Everyone craves joy. It’s what we are made for. Which is why advertisers and politicians want to get their grubby hands on it. Last year Burger King ran a campaign called “bundles of joy” featuring mums breastfeeding their newborns and tucking into a Whopper. It was unbelievably crass.
The word joy is precious and needs to be protected against overuse and ugliness.
During the recent presidential election in the United States, Democrats campaigned on “bringing back the joy.” “This is a brutal, tough business,” former President Bill Clinton said. “We need Kamala Harris, the president of joy, to lead us.”
Look how that turned out—perhaps Americans revolted at the prospect of joyful bureaucrats checking their tax returns.
The LGBT movement is also trying to steal the word joy, just as it defiled the word “gay” over the past few decades. Gay once connoted innocent enjoyment—now it is a synonym for the basest kind of hedonism.
“Joy” has been enthusiastically adopted by the transgender movement. Minus 18, an Australian company which ushers young people into the alphabet soup lifestyle, often celebrates “trans joy”. This is—supposedly—the exhilaration of finding one’s true identity.
So here’s the problem. How do you tell the difference between genuine joy and bogus joy, between joy that satiates without satiating, slakes our thirst for truth and love, and joy that gives you a buzz for a year, a week, an hour, a minute?
True joy is a kind of ecstasy which lifts us beyond ourselves; it’s an open door to transcendence, an intimation of the divine. It is not discovering ourselves; it’s transcendence, not transgender. It’s discovering the truth about God and the world. It leads us to give ourselves to others, not to mope about self-fulfilment. Mother Teresa, with her gift for slogans, defined Christian joy with a simple acronym—JOY = Jesus Others You.
The brilliant young Australian poet Michael Dranfield wrote poignantly about the joy of discovering his identity. His heart-breaking poem Fix ends with these lines:
For a while the fires die down in you
Until you die down in the fires
Once you have become a drug addict
You will never want to be anything else.
Dransfield died of an overdose in 1973. He was only 25 years old. So much for the joy of drugs, of sex, of power, of Whoppers. They all end in the same ashes.
“Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian,” GK Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy. He could have been writing about Bishop Percy’s ordination.