THE LENTEN CALL TO JOY One leg of the tripod of lent is the call to joy.

None of us can insure for ourselves a continuous run of good things to support happiness from the outside. Sometimes life presents us with wonderful joys and then life is so good! But then again when clouds cover our days we have a sinking feeling of ennui. How to be content during those times is a major challenge to all of us. It is certain that we must have a viewpoint that covers when our day is sunshine and when it is darkness. In the Sacred Scriptures, Joy is mentioned no fewer than 350 times as a product of our living with God and graced by Jesus. I am sure that what is meant is not a delirious state of mind, where your parade is never rained on. Jesus' communion with his Father did not guarantee a serendipitous life for him. So it seems that our view in order to be real must account for all the outright crucifixions in our life and all the uncomfortable hassles that we have to endure that may drive us dizzy. The Cross and Crown theme seems to work best. We have to know that some level of acceptance of life as we experience it becomes necessary. The Cross when it appears in our lives, and it will, needs to be embraced. "Pick up your cross", says Jesus. You can't walk around it, pretend it is not there, or shift it to someone else. Not accepting the cross will itself becomes a cross. Here is where faith becomes real. The idea that faith is a belief in a series of unlikely propositions is an unfortunate detour. Faith, is embracing the capricious, dangerous, unpredictable moments of life as if you were Jesus! He did that, not without protest, mind you. But in the end he found his peace in the emotional conscious space between the happening and the acceptance.

When Jesus did accept the cross, he found peace, and additional conviction to be his Father's image to the world. He said, "Father Forgive them". The whole point we want to absorb is this: Life is never a straight unbroken line. Zig, Zags all over the place. Perfect moral rectitude may look good on a philosopher's page, but it avoids reals. Accepting life is in essence the way of the cross, it is also the way to peace and contentment. The more ebullient word is happiness. ~ LM