“Try to fulfill each day’s task steadily and cheerfully. Be merry, really merry. The life of a true Christian should be a perpetual jubilee, a prelude to the festivals of eternity.”
- Théophone Vérnard, martyr

Last year, on Ash Wednesday my co-workers and I spent the day on retreat. We began the morning in a beautiful old chapel attached to a convent in Jersey City. The facilitator for the morning began the opening reflection speaking about the relationship between Lent and creating a clean heart.

Charged with deep insight and devotion she encouraged our prayer to be, “Cremate in me a new heart, Lord.”

“Wow,” I thought to myself, “that’s certainly a pertinent slip of the tongue,” especially considering her next words were about making “ashes of all that is not of God.”

I don’t know if anyone else caught the cremation reference but, for me, it signaled a different beginning to Lent that year, one with a new perspective on sacrifice as burnt offerings. The next step would be to consider what in my life needed to be cremated.

What was “not of God?” That’s a hard question to ask of oneself, and even harder to answer honestly.

In his book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Father Henri Nouwen suggests that we fall short of God when we continually look for love in all the wrong places. “As long as I keep running about asking: ‘Do you love me? Do you really love me?’ I give all power to the voices in the world and put myself in bondage because the world is filled with ‘ifs.’ ” The ‘ifs’, he explains, are the conditions by which we are valued in the world—beauty, intelligence, wealth, power, success. “These ‘ifs’ enslave me, since it is impossible to respond adequately to all of them. The world’s love is and always will be conditional. As long as I keep looking for my true self in the world of conditional love, I will remain ‘hooked’ to the world— trying, failing, and trying again.”

Being hooked to the world generates lots of fallout in our spiritual and emotional lives, not the least of which is a loss of joy.

I remember once buying a poster which read, “If someone accused you of being a Christian would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

What struck me as good evidence was not just Mass attendance or reading Scripture or having head knowledge of the faith, but, rather, living with joy; a deep, abiding joy that rises up from faith, hope and love.

Can you imagine the effect such joy would have on our parishes, our classrooms, our ministries, our liturgies? Joy is enticing and contagious; a powerful tool for evangelization.

Our faith is rooted in joy, in the Word of God. A concordance of biblical words notes that some variety of the word joy is mentioned more than 250 times in the Old Testament alone, and another several hundred times in the New Testament.

“Rejoice always,” wrote St. Paul to the troubled community in Thessalonica, “Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks …” His words are encouragement for us today as we struggle with the values of the world and walk through times of sorrow and gladness, light and darkness. Still, life often brings us burdens and sorrows so deep that we wonder if even God could bear them. How are we to be joyful in the midst of grief?

Many years ago, when I was still a teenager, I saw my first Broadway play, Fiddler on the Roof.

It made a profound impression on me and began to crystallize my understanding that joy could be the undercurrent of life no matter what the circumstances.

I began to realize that joy does not deny sorrow, but rather, embraces it as an affirmation of life in all its fullness. As Tevye, the poor dairyman sings, “To life, l’chaim! l’chaim, l’chaim, to life! Life has a way of confusing us, Blessing and bruising us. Drink, l’chaim, to life!”

As we journey closer to Holy Week and Easter, our celebration of Life, may we continue to pray, “Cremate in me a clean heart, Lord,” so that joy may rise from the ashes of our Lenten sacrifices.