In the life of St. Francis of Assisi, we find this grateful joy at every gift of God wonderfully united to a deep sorrow over the disharmony of this valley of tears. His attitude expresses in an exemplary way the right response of man to the dual aspect of terrestrial life. The same one who shed so many tears over his sins and whose heart was pierced by pain because “Love is so little loved,” with his eyesight almost gone and his body all but completely broken, was to write the Canticle to the Sun, that superb paean of joy.

Christians must interweave their lives with true sorrow, but with even greater joy

It would be a great error, then, to deny that a Christian should be glad of the creaturely goods, too, which he owes to God’s munificence: as though the precariousness of our situation on earth and the ocean of sufferings in the world forbade us to enjoy the blessings God has accorded to each of us. No, we should always display a full and adequate response to God and to everything He sends us.

Is it suffering; is it the cross? Let us readily acquiesce in His holy will, yet always sustained and consoled by hope, and aware “that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come, that shall be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18).

Again, if joy is what falls to our lot, we should appreciate it gratefully, and take an unrestrained delight in the bounty of God, without however allowing our happiness to make us forgetful of the unchangeable gravity of our earthly situation.

In brief, a true Christian must not live in a way as though Christ had never spoken the words, “Blessed are they that mourn,” but even less in a way as though He had not also said to His disciples, “Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is great in heaven.” The Christian knows: “Pain and suffering are only there for the sake of joy.” (Father Heribert Holzapfel, O.F.M., “Freude”)

The tissue of a Christian’s life must be interwoven with threads of true joy and threads of true sorrow alike, because we have not yet arrived at the point “where God shall wipe away all tears.” But it is joy that must have the primacy: for, after the lumen Christi has brightened the world, even on earth there is incomparably more cause for bliss than for sorrow. Joy must be the deeper, the decisive element, the form of our life, as it were. For that which warrants our joy is the supreme reality, the ultimate word in the universe. The sufferings of this world are essentially transitory. Happiness, eternal and indestructible, awaits all those who follow Christ.

However dark the griefs and terrible the sufferings a Christian may know, over and above them soars the triumphant luster of joy. This is the spirit of the Liturgy. With all its mournfulness, Passion Week leads up to the definitive and ultimate reality of Easter: the soaring beatitude transcending all time; and from the latter is derived the keynote of the Liturgy of the whole year. The seasons of alleluia far outweigh those in which alleluia is not sung. Even during the time of Advent and of Lent, a ray of hope, and with it of joy, is never absent.