God of Joy.

Thou hast girded me with joy” Psalm 30:12.

God is a God of joy. And if Christianity is a religion of fun, it is essential because it directly shares in the joy that dwells in the Holy Trinity. Happiness is like the atmosphere that reigns in God. We used to say that God is mercy, love, and peace. In certain circumstances of life, man can understand with the heart the divine attributes revealed to us. He experiences, for example, the fatherly goodness of God, who cares for his personal needs, or the mercy of Jesus Christ, who forgives his sins.

To enjoy joy, we must immerse ourselves in the atmosphere of the Holy Trinity. God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit experience complete and perfect joy because of the love with which they love one another. God’s perfect love results from the mutual self-giving of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. For as soon as there is a gift, there is potential joy. In God, this gift is complete; his happiness is complete. The Father is the joy of his Son when he gives himself entirely to him. The Son is the joy of his Father when he also gives himself entirely to him. They are each other’s joy for each other. And to give an idea of this, we can say that the explosion of love between them is the person of the Holy Spirit.

Despite the sublime doctrine, Holy Scripture does not despise the simple joys of life. It knows the joy of a bountiful harvest or vintage, the joy of being among brothers and being able to glorify God together, the happiness of the birth of a child, and the joy that springs from admiring creation. Perhaps we are little aware of this, which is why the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement still holds: “You all strike me as little redeemed people.”

Christian joy presupposes a person naturally capable of rejoicing. Human pleasures are pleasing to God. Let us not forget to offer them to Him to purify them, sanctify them, and intensify them. But the discovery of true joy presupposes that we can advance higher, that we do not stop at the horizontal level of the pleasures offered, but that we find a vertical direction in them.

For a Christian, joy is, above all, spiritual joy. Usually, it radiates into all-natural and emotional joys. She makes the natural joys the true joys of the human heart. He who stops at human joys, however exhilarating they may be, without trying to connect them with their source, only verifies their transitory character. His longing for authentic joy will not be fulfilled.

Man is a being who desires. Therefore, he is capable of knowing joy. He cannot live without it and seeks it with all his might. Very often, the desire for pleasure and happiness inspires his actions and decisions in life. But man is, first and foremost, a spiritual being. God created him to live in union with Him. Therefore, any joy cannot satisfy him. His heart will be filled only when he receives true pleasure, such as the world cannot give, but which God grants to the one who asks for it.