Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus prays, saying, “I speak this in the world so that they may share my joy completely.”
Sadness of soul follows from the heaviness of self-regard, a sadness and weight that precludes real union with the other. Joy, on the other hand, must be the principal “emotion” shared by the Trinitarian persons, since their life is nothing but self-forgetting love. Joy, a concomitant of that ecstasy, is the mark of anyone caught in the loop of grace and the gift of Jesus Christ to his Church.
Chesterton’s magnificent comment is apposite here: “A characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.” And nothing so conquers the dull sadness and heaviness of self-regard—nothing so makes us fly with lightness and levity—as the surprise and facticity of the Resurrection.