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What was the source of Michelangelo’s joy?
Gloria Hutchinson wrote: “In his later years, Michelangelo Buonarroti regretted that he had given his life to ‘painting and sculpture, labor and good faith.’ He wished that he had taken up the making of matches as a child rather than the drawings for which his father punished him. However, even as he complained in a sonnet: ‘Melancholy is my joy/And discomfort is my rest,’ Michelangelo betrayed a relish for the artist's vocation.'
“Had he not loved the labor of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel while lying on his back on makeshift scaffolding, would he have completed this four-year solitary project? Despite his complaints, the artist experienced joy in the work of creation.
Statue of Michelangelo Buonarroti, outside Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy; photo: Yair Haklai“Michelangelo chided his fellow Christian artists for their failure to communicate the great joy of the risen Christ. They were far too preoccupied, he said, with presenting the horrors of the crucifixion as though the cross were the last word. They should instead be celebrating the victory of Christ over death and evil in all its guises. (Gloria Hutchinson, A Retreat With Gerard Manley Hopkins & Hildegard of Bingen, Turning Pain into Power, Cincinnati: St .Anthony Messenger, 1995, pages 49-50.)
“In his Remarks to Fellow Christian Painters (1564), the greatest artist the world has ever known commented: ‘That is the tonic we need to keep us healthy, the trumpet blast to fire our blood and send us crowding in behind our Master, swinging happily upon our way, laughing and singing and recklessly unafraid because the feel is in the air, and our hearts thrill to it.” (quoted in the online: Joyful Noiseletter, Portage, Michigan, Fellowship of Merry Christians, June-July 1994, page 4)
Michelangelo the artist had an affinity for essentials. He knew that the essential joy of the Christian is the joy of the resurrection, the all-crucial joy of redemption. He felt that there was no life without joy. Léon Bloy, another artist, wrote: “Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.”
How can we associate joy with La Salette?
Is it a bit contrived to associate joy with La Salette? The La Salette point of reference seems to be sadness and tears, not joy. And yet, it is hard to deny that the Lady’s general purpose in coming to La Salette is the desire for joy for her people. Sin is sadness. Benjamin Franklin, no less, wrote that “Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden. It is forbidden because it is hurtful.”
The reason for the Lady’s tears comes within the opening declaration: “If my people will not submit, I will be forced to let go the arm of my Son.” This is the only time we know of where the Beautiful Lady is compelled, forced, to do anything. We can understand her regret and sorrow welling into tears of helplessness. There is nothing quite like the disappearance of joy in life, and the Lady is reflecting the sadness that will cover the land of Europe and the world.
Joy never simply disappears leaving only a void. We have all experienced the sorrow that comes from the death of a loved one, even more, from the sickness and suffering of a friend, a child, before which we are maddeningly helpless. Then and there, the light goes out of our lives. Whatever pleasures we may meet along the way blend with the sadness within.
“...that my joy may be in you,
and that your joy may be complete”
Early French holy card; quote from Lamentations 112a:
“Is there any sorrow like my sorrow.”These words (John 15:11) express what happens when someone follows the will of God, or submits to the word of God, or obeys the law of the Lord – all expressions similar in meaning to Christ’s words, “If you keep my commandments” (John 15:10). The “commandment” given in the Gospel of John, though, is of a more interior scope: that of “loving one another as I have loved you.”
Reconciliation with God requires four things
The words of the Lady of La Salette provide the means to this lofty purpose: prayer, Lenten penance, obedience to the law of Sunday rest, and veneration for the Name. These four instances of the will of God may sound elementary or shallow, but, fully understood and deepened by a lifetime of practice, they can bring about the purest spiritual life.
- Prayer is a relationship of Person to person and a requisite for the life of the Spirit.
- Penance and self-denial, although virtual outcasts in present day spirituality are as necessary to a loving relationship as water is to ice. Ask any married couple whether their marriage would hold together without constant self-forgetfulness.
- Sunday rest means setting aside some special time in our lives for the Other. We measure time spent with another as the gauge of love. “Time spent” means that we provide our presence to God in unmitigated strength. After all, our “presence” is what pleases God the most. Christ did not die for my work and my achievements; he did not die for my reputation or my “name,” or my wealth, or even my prayer–he died for me.
My person, all and whole, is the most precious gift I can offer to God. Hence, the crucial importance of a day of rest, a day of apartness that I spend wholly with the Lord. I am present before God on other days; but Sunday presence is meant to be undivided, golden time–all God’s. In his eyes, this is the most exquisite of gifts. - Honoring the Name is a staple of Old Testament spirituality, which demands what all true love demands as a requisite: respect, deep-down deference and honor for the Name, which is another word for the Person. Respect for the other is the first law of love.
The joy that will come as a result of abiding with these “commandments” will not be a common species of joy. It will not even belong to us, be our own: “that my joy may be yours,” said Christ, “and that your joy may be complete.”
At La Salette, the Lady weeps over our sadness and loss of joy. Her reproaches and the commandments she highlights are meant to restore this joy. Since sadness comes from forgetting the commandments, joy will come from embracing them anew.
The sources of happiness versus joy
Happiness: The great American statesman, Thomas Jefferson, had it right when he spoke of “the pursuit of happiness.” People are forever chasing after it; it is like the electric rabbit at the dog track: the dogs will never catch the elusive hare. Happiness is a cousin-word to “happening” and happenstance: it is the result of whatever good and “happy” thing that could happen to me on a given day. Happiness is a lottery.
Joy: However, our joy is something else. It is a gift, freely given. What greater joy for a hungry peasant is there than self-sown potatoes, and stones turning into those miraculous mounds of wheat. Was there a better way for the Lady to express the “gift” aspect of these harvests than through the other-worldly provenance of this promised bounty? This can only be God’s bounty, bringing God’s own joy to earth, a joy inaccessible by human means.
Where can we get the joy of Christ?
The words of the Beautiful Lady at La Salette do not provide all the conditions for attaining the joy of Christ. But they are a beginning, an initial view reaching into intimacy with Christ and tasting that affection for Christ which is the true joy that Christ calls “my joy.” We may walk in grief and trial, but we must know that if happiness cannot co-exist with suffering, the joy of Christ can and does.
No less than John Henry Cardinal Newman reminds us: “No Gloom is no Christian temper; that repentance is not real, which has not love in it; that self-chastisement is not acceptable, which is not sweetened by faith and cheerfulness. We must live in sunshine, even when in sorrow; we must live in God's presence; we must not shut ourselves up in our own hearts, even when we are reckoning up our past sins.” (John Henry Cardinal Newman, Our Sadness is turned into joy. Parochial and Plain Sermons. V. 271).