Joy has long been a component of the retail landscape this time of year. I've seen it on department store windows in Manhattan -- most amusingly nearby St. Francis of Assisi Church. Of course, even if you are the easiest person in the world to please, there is no consumer exchange that will deliver true joy. And yet, in the face of hardship and torture, joy is possible. That which is so casually referred to in order to make a sale is one of the most hard-fought and enduring treasures.
A video recently unearthed by the Israeli Defense Forces shows Israeli hostages taken in the Oct. 7 attack in captivity holding a Hanukah service. In their suffering, there was a confidence in God, faith and even joy. There is a spirit of victory that lives in resilience -- or makes resilience possible -- that insists on joy, because it's what evil hates. And so, in the hostages' insistence on community when they were being physically inundated by darkness, there was a stubborn, awesome joy that even terrorism couldn't kill.
Those men who were lighting candles in prayer -- Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat and Almog Sarusi -- were all ultimately murdered by Hamas. Evil may have taken their lives, but they held on to joy.
May that memory be a blessing to all who are left both righteously angry at their murder, now part of the chronicles of our world's cruelty to the Jewish people -- and a challenge to never let go of joy, and fight for the freedom to pursue it for as long as we each have breath left in us.
A Catholic priest imprisoned by Nazis in 1944 wrote about joy as well. His meditations would be smuggled out on strips of paper.
"The conditions for true joy have nothing to do with conditions of our exterior life, but consist of man's interior frame of mind and competence, which make it possible now and again for him to sense, even in adverse external circumstances, what life is basically about," Father Alfred Delp wrote from Tegel Prison, before he was executed by hanging in February 1945.
Recommended
"Is there any point in bothering about joy?" he wrote. "Is joy not among those luxury items of life that have no place in the meager private area tolerated in wartime conversations? Certainly it has no place in a prison cell where someone is pacing back and forth, his hands in irons, his heart swelled by all the winds of longing, his head filled with worries and questions."
As you may expect from a man who devoted his life to God and his service, Delp did contend that joy didn't have to do with who was in political power or your purchasing power. It's all about relationship with God.
"How should we live so that we are capable -- or can become capable -- of true joy? This question should occupy us more today than it has in the past," Delp reflected.
Delp, in fact, pointed to St. Francis and his "Canticle to the Sun," which could be seen as "mere lyrical rambling," but really "expresses the great inner freedom that enabled him to observe the intrinsic value and discover the fulfilling assignment within all things." That's something evil cannot rob from a soul that is determined to stay with God, whatever man may inflict.
"The promises of God stand above us, more valid than the stars and more effective than the sun," Delp wrote. "Based on these promises, we will become healthy and free, from the center of our being," he wrote. "The promises have turned us around and, at once, opened life out into the infinite," he continued. And as if he were in those tunnels with the six Israeli men, he wrote: "Even lamentation retains the song of these promises, and distress their sound, and loneliness their confidence."
Man's earthly life may be exterminated, but joy does not die. Not with God. And you can't buy that, even in December; you can only live it and be someone's encounter with it in union with the perfection of the divine.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book "A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living." She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan's pro-life commission in New York, and is on the board of the University of Mary. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.
Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Townhall’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join Townhall VIP and use the promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member