We Are An Easter People: Joy
What does it actually mean to be joyful?
Not happy. Joy and happiness are not the same thing. Happiness shifts with circumstances. Joy runs deeper. It is possible to be in the middle of uncertainty, inadequacy, or struggle, and still carry something unshakeable underneath it all. But where does that come from? And how do we get there?
St. Paul points us to the source. In Romans 6:4, he writes that "as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life." Easter joy is not a feeling we manufacture or a mood we maintain. It is a life we are invited to enter, a life made possible because Christ is Risen, and because His resurrection changes everything, including us.
This past year marked one year since I was received into the Church. And what a year it has been. Eventful, surprising, and to my own surprise, full of joy. Not a tidy joy, but a real one. The kind that meets you in the middle of your insufficiency, and remains.
Because joy, I have learnt, does not wait for you to have it all together. One of the places I encountered this most acutely was in mission. Each time I was called to step out, to serve, to share, to be present to others in the Lord's name, a familiar voice would rise up: “You are not spiritual enough.” “ You are not smart enough.” “You don't speak like the others.” These were not new lies. They were the same ones I had carried long before I came to faith, and I had quietly assumed that coming into the Church would silence them but they followed me in. I struggled to understand how the Lord could use me, in all my sin and shame, with all my rough edges still very much intact. The gap between who I felt I was and who I thought I needed to be before God could work through me felt impossibly wide. And so I held back, again and again, crippled not by circumstance but by my own perception of myself. What I did not expect was where the answer would come from. It was the Eucharist.
In those moments of unworthiness and hesitation, it was the Eucharist that returned me to the truth. That in the breaking of bread, the Risen Lord makes Himself known, thinly veiled under the appearance of bread, yet wholly and truly present. Each time I brought my smallness to Him in that encounter, something shifted. Not a dramatic silencing of every doubt, but a quiet, stubborn joy that rose beneath them. A joy that said: He is Risen. And I get to walk with Him.
It is here that the words of Jesus in John 15:11 ring true: "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full." The joy we seek is not our own to generate. It is His, given to us. And it is in returning to Him, again and again, that we find it waiting.
This is the nature of Easter joy. It is not the absence of struggle. It is the presence of Christ within it. The Catechism reminds us that "in every circumstance, each one of us should hope, with the grace of God, to persevere 'to the end' and to obtain the joy of heaven, as God's eternal reward for the good works accomplished with the grace of Christ" (CCC 1821). Joy, then, is not a reward for the already holy. It is the companion of those who keep walking, in hope, in grace, in the everyday decision to return to the Lord despite their weakness. It is available to us not at the finish line, but along the way.
And it is the Resurrection that makes this possible. CCC 635 reminds us that Christ descended into death so that "the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live." The Resurrection was not merely Christ's own emergence from the tomb. It was the opening of every tomb. Including the ones we build inside ourselves, brick by brick, out of shame and self-doubt and the quiet conviction that we are not enough.
Brothers and sisters, joy is not something you achieve when you have finally become the person you think God wants you to be. Joy is what happens when you let the Risen Christ walk with you as you are, in the process of becoming.
So how do we grow in this? I think it begins with returning, again and again, to the places where the Risen Lord makes Himself known. Return to the Eucharist. Bring your smallness, your doubt, your lack, and place it before Him. Let the fact of His resurrection be larger than the voice that tells you to stay small. Return to Scripture, and let His words reorient you when the familiar lies creep back in. Return to community, because joy is rarely grown in isolation. We need one another to remind us of what is true when we have forgotten.
And when the voice rises up again, as it will, do not wait until you feel worthy to step out. Step out anyway. Joy, I have found, is often waiting on the other side of the very thing you were afraid to do. He is Risen. That is enough. And in that truth, there is more joy than we know what to do with.