Don’t miss our Christmas Special of 25% off all new paid, gift, and upgraded subscriptions, now through Epiphany. See below for more information.
“This is the day that the Lord has made,” cries the psalmist, in an outburst of praise. “Let us be glad and rejoice in it!”
I am thinking of our Word of the Week, joy, and that verse above, as the joyful and jolly day of Christmas draws near, and it seems to me to broach a great mystery, a magnum mysterium indeed. I can pursue pleasure, and often find it, and that may be innocent enough. Our new puppy, Molly, is sleeping under my arm as I type these words, and that is a modest and humble pleasure, as it will be another kind of pleasure to romp about with her when she wakes up. We’ve gone shopping as always, this season of Christmas, and it’s a fine pleasure to watch my wife and my children open their gifts with an expression of surprise and delight, as it pleases them when I open mine. But sometimes a gift can touch the deepest core of the person who receives it, and then you may get the surprise beyond surprise, and something that you’d be wrong to call pleasure, just as the faint pretty wavering of starlight in a puddle is not the glory of the heavens above.
The thing about joy is that you can’t pursue it, because it isn’t something you accomplish, or earn, or create, or ferret out of a hole in your life. It is closer to solemnity than it is to pleasure, and that’s why tears sometimes accompany it, tears that well up uncalled from the heart. You can, I guess, choose to be joyless: you can run with all your might from the grand humility of accepting the gift of joy. You can say, “I will not,” and demand a self-satisfied pride in your own high station as a mean and petty substitute for joy. It’s what the financier Anthony Kirby attempts to do in one of our Films of the Week, You Can’t Take It with You, while the man whose property he wants to gobble up, “Grandpa” Vanderhof, has long left off the pursuit of highness and mightiness, gaining merriment instead, and being ready for joy whenever and however it comes — in the delight of people who live with him, who make toys, or set off fireworks, or dance, or paint badly, or fall in love. And it is also what we are going to find in a few days in our upcoming Film of the Week — the joy that can break into the night of human sin and folly.
Think then about what the psalmist says: “This is the day that the Lord has made.” Unless the Lord makes the day, the very sun shines in vain. Because the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth, has made the day, it is more than proper to rejoice in it. It is the only thing you can do! You cannot have the day that the Lord has made, and not rejoice: it would be like accepting and rejecting a gift at the same time, like saying, “How good it is that you are!” and then walking away with a shrug. It cannot be done.
I’ve said that you can’t pursue joy, but I might concede that you can follow a few paths that lead to its precincts. Look for where people enjoy an innocent merriment, as when boys and girls are dancing and have no thought for anything unchaste, but are delighting in youth and beauty, as their elders look on and sometimes join in. I’d say you’re in joy’s barn, where the fiddlers sit on the haystacks. Look for solemnity, not grimness, not ennui — the solemnity of celebration and gratitude, as when children, dressed as they dress only for the greatest of feasts, walk with their parents into church, which on Christmas Eve strikes their eyes with glory. I’d say you are in joy’s vestibule, where people whisper and greet you more with their eyes than with their voices. Or go to the stable itself. O great mystery, and wondrous sacrament, that animals should see the Lord newborn, lying in a manger.
Our word joy, like most of our words beginning with j, such as jingle, jolly, and juniper, comes to us from the Norman French. We had the sound in Old English that we now spell with j, as in our old word for bridge, but it couldn’t come at the beginning of a word, just as our sound ng can’t, either, though it certainly does in other languages. So those French-speaking descendants of the Vikings came over with their Jacks and Jills, and they brought the word joy too. It came from Latin gaudia, joys, itself from the verb gaudere, to rejoice. Now that plural gaudia was eventually mistaken for a singular, and it gave us a noun for something fancy and happy, a gaud, and an adjective for something full of fancy decorations, something gaudy. That’s come to suggest a little too much, or too cheap, but something of the older meaning is still preserved at Oxford, where a Gaudy Night is a big reunion celebration for alumni. And something of the holiness of joy was preserved in the old custom of making the Our Father bead on the rosary fancier than the others: the gaudy.
To all of our readers: May joy seek you out and find you!
Word & Song is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber.
Christmas Discount Offers 2023
Upgrade to paid or give a gift subscription now through Epiphany!
(See printable gift certificates below.)
And if you are looking for something for the avid readers on your list, please do check out Professor Esolen’s Book Page. There’s literally something for everyone there, including two new books which we have just added to the list (see below). If you would like a signed bookplate for your recipient, please send us a stamped-self-addressed envelope and tell us to whom Tony should inscribe it. (35 School St., Warner NH 03278)
New Books this Fall:
To print your gift certificate, right-click on image and choose “Save Image As.” Print from that file. Merry Christmas!
JOY