Shout for Joy

What’s worth shouting for?

We shout for what we want to defend. We shout for those whom we love. We shout out of excitement, ecstasy. We shout out of anger, ire, disgust… shouting seems to make a stake, a claim, a commitment to or relationship with someone (perhaps a lover, a deity) or something (an ideology, a sporting event). Our shouts are proclamations of favor or renunciation. We shout against what we refute; we shout for what we believe in and support.

But shouting isn’t common. It’s not popular in literary dialogues or in day-to-day speech, even “office talk.” I rarely raise my voice. “Shouting” isn’t something I like to do, because, well, it’s risky. It’s a bold proclamation of belief or disbelief, of support or rejection. Like an infant, to shout is to cry out in love or in fear, out of anxiety or out of jubilation.  But why resist shouting? Why resist telling the world what we love? What we dislike? But more so, what we love, what gives us life? To shout is to be human, in its purest form: to shout is to give heart to words, perhaps even to a Word, that we truly live for and from.

All of this comes in context to today’s responsorial psalm:

Shout joyfully to God, all the earth,
sing praise to the glory of his name;
proclaim his glorious praise. 

Psalm 66 encourages us to: cry out to God with joy!  Appropriately, since Easter is a season of joy. It is a time to rejoice. To sing, to dance, to fully embrace the light of spring, new life, new birth—to truly embrace the life and the Resurrection: Christ.

Joy?

Joy has been and continues to be a very big “buzz word” for me this Easter. It’s something I’ve been reflecting on and praying for. Joy is the mark of a Christian. Pope Francis loves to talk about this; some of his best lines on “Christian joy” follow:

"A Christian is a man, or a woman, of joy: a man and a woman with joy in their heart. There is no Christian without joy! You may be told that there are many such Christians," the pope warned, but “they are not Christians! They say they are, but they are not! They are missing something.” 

As Christians, our “identity card” must be our joy because our faith is firm and our hope secured to the love of God, the salvation of Christ. Without joy, there is no life in the Spirit; without joy, we’re enslaved to our misery. Francis’s words are heavy and they strike my heart. Am I joyful? What does it meant to authentically rejoice?

This is not a call to eternal, perpetual, happiness (in this life at least). Joy is not happiness. Happiness is fleeting, momentary; joy is a state of being, a disposition, and an interior reality.

This call to joy isn’t a call to erase or neglect our problems or the reality of suffering. Think of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (cf. Matthew 5). Christian joy isn’t a denial of our difficulties, of our sorrows. Christian joy is an embrace of the reality of life, of the cross. We must be joyful as we are mourning, as we are hungering and thirsting for justice and righteousness. This joy springs from a hope founded on faith that manifests as love: a Love who is a Person; a love, which knows that suffering is not our end, but rather that the Resurrection is real and our suffering efficacious as we share in the sufferings of Love, of God in the flesh.

This seems like a paradox: to joyfully mourn? But yes—that’s the very nature of the dynamic Spirit of Jesus Christ in his disciples. Death has no hold on this people who are living out the Easter joy of the Resurrection. These disciples “shout joyfully to God!”

Their hearts are transformed and their tongues tell of the goodness of God’s glory alive within them. That is something worth shouting about—something, someone, worth living for.