Pleasure is never enough: Lighting the way to joy

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 26, 2024

Have you ever stopped to consider how closely joy is associated with hope? This is so true that the Latin verb which means “to be without hope” is desparare, from which we get the English word despair. And despair is also what destroys joy. It is the ultimate sadness.

I mention this during the Christmas Season because it is the answer to the riddle of our modern pursuit of pleasure. It is obviously desirable to feel pleasure, but pleasure is a hideous trap without hope. We will pursue pleasure with increasing desperation when we are without hope, to stave off the temptation to suicide. Thus pleasure without hope tends to degenerate into a frenetic attempt to distract ourselves from the emptiness we feel inside.

This is as succinct a description of the crisis of our dominant culture in the West as anyone can conceive: A despairing demand for pleasure as a substitute for the loss of meaning.

Empty pleasures

Nothing better characterizes the ancient pagan world than the pursuit of pleasure in the absence of meaning—and who can doubt that the same can be said now about the post-Christian West. The strong gods of hedonism can only distract us; they cannot save us. The more we free ourselves from the “shackles” of the Divine, the more enslaved to our natural human horizons we become. The more we proclaim our liberty from any transcendent demand of goodness or virtue, the more we collapse into the pursuit of whatever promises to give us pleasure…and the more hopeless we become.

This has always been the ultimate human paradox: Insofar as we abandon the attempt to recognize a real, objective goodness and truth, we are doomed to seek disordered pleasures which do nothing but strip away our self-respect as we fashion meaningless lives that depend on scratching one itch after another—transient pleasures which become harder and harder to sustain in the face of our growing sense of impending doom. This is what lies at the root of the ancient axiom, “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Now, out of a fear of the apparent restrictions imposed by any objective apprehension of “the good”, we repeatedly choose our desire for pleasure over the more strenuous (and in our day more embarrassing) calls to truth and goodness that urge us to reflect more deeply on the nature of reality, and on our need to be saved.

Our problem, of course, is that the human person is unique in the natural world in the ability to discern and reflect upon what life means. The human person by his very nature transcends the pleasures or pains of the moment to find their purpose within an intelligible reality. Who or what am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? What is my destiny? What are the implications and challenges of the concept of truth, the concept of goodness, the concept of beauty? We may call these “transcendentals” only by habit, but at times most of us wonder what makes them transcendent, what it is that they transcend, and how, and—perhaps above all—why?

Incarnation

It is just here that Christianity greets us with a truly astonishing surprise. It does not begin with an argument; it begins with a fact, the same fact that was descrbed initially in two different and very famous ways.. First by a fisherman named John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men…. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. And from his fulness have we all received, grace upon grace. [Jn 1-4, 9-16]

And second by a doctor named Luke:

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.” And Mary said to the angel, “How shall this be, since I have no husband?” And the angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.” [Lk 1:26-35]

Not a theory but an experience

My point is that we come face to face here not with an argument but with a testimony. The two are not the same. The Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is not presented as a theory but as a fact. When John the Baptist exclaimed, “Behold, the Lamb of God!”, Andrew and another of John’s disciples asked Christ where he was staying, and received the invitation, “Come and see.” And so they spent the day with Him. Then Andrew sought out his brother Simon and said, “We have found the Messiah.” When Andrew brought Simon to Christ, Christ changed his name to Peter, meaning Rock—and began to shape him for a mission.

The next day, Jesus went to Galilee and found Philip, and said to him, “Follow me.” Then Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph” (cf., Jn 1:32-45).

This is how it always works. Christ touches first one and then another, in the reality of their humanity, in the midst of their daily lives. He identifies and He calls. But those who have already been identified and called are supposed to go out into both the highways and the hedgerows and invite others to experience Christ for themselves. Each path to Jesus Christ will be different of course, but at Christmas we ought also to be reminded of the very wisest of pre-Christian men, who were willing to follow the star so that they too could “come and see”.

A light under a bushel basket is useless to others (Mt 5:15). At Christmas, we are called again to light the way—to invite others into a lighted home, and into a lighted Church, and so into the Light of Christ.

They called them and charged them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John answered, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight for us to obey you rather than God. Surely we cannot help speaking of what we have heard and seen.” [Acts 4:19-20]