ADVENT JOY— The third candle is pink and symbolizes joy. It is called the “Shepherd’s Candle,” and is pink because rose is a liturgical colour for joy. The third Sunday of Advent is Gaudete Sunday and is meant to remind us of the joy that the world experienced at the birth of Jesus, as well as the joy that the faithful have reached the midpoint of Advent.

Rolheiser (2002) writes that: Every year on the third Sunday of Advent, the church asks us to do a meditation on joy. That seems a curious thing to ask, though it becomes less curious when we actually reflect on the nature of joy. What is joy?

Few things are as misunderstood as is the notion of joy. Of itself that wouldn’t be serious except that in this case we are often left chasing the wrong things in life.

Too often we confuse joy with good cheer or with a certain rallying of the spirit that we try to crank up when we go to a party or let off steam on a Friday night. We tend to think of joy this way: There is ordinary time in our lives, when duty, work, emotional and financial burdens, tiredness, worries, and pressure of all kinds keep us from enjoying life and from being as cheery and pleasant as we would like. We think of ordinary times in our lives as keeping us from joy – the grind, the routine, the rat-race, the work-week – and so we look forward to special times, weekends, nights out, vacation times, social times, celebrations, and parties where we can break the routine, break out, enjoy ourselves, and experience joy.

Joy then is identified with the boisterous good cheer we try to crank up at parties or the lack of pressure and the freedom from burdens that we feel when on vacation. But is this joy? It can be, though often isn’t. The loud robust cheer that we enter into at parties is often little more than a desperate effort to keep our depressions at bay, a form of denial. That’s why the good cheer dissolves so quickly when we go home and why, three days after returning from vacation, we are again just as tired and in need of a vacation as before.

What is joy? Joy can never be induced, cranked up, or made to happen. It’s something that has to find us precisely within our ordinary, duty-bound, burdened, full-of-worries, and pressured lives…. You can’t find joy, it has to find you. That’s its real quality. As the various versions of The Prayer of St. Francis put it, we can never attain joy, consolation, peace, forgiveness, love, and understanding by actively pursuing them. We attain them by giving them out…The great mystic, John of the Cross, ends one of his most famous instructions with this poem:

To reach satisfaction in all
desire its possession in nothing.
To come to possess all
desire the possession of nothing.
To arrive at being all
desire to be nothing.
To come to the knowledge of all
desire the knowledge of nothing.
To come to the pleasure you have not
you must go by the way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not
you must go by a way in which you know not.
To come to the possession you have not
you must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not
you must go by a way in which you are not.
That, and that alone, is a recipe for joy.