What is the Gospel? Isn’t the Good News Itself the same as changing sadness into joy? Of course. This is who Jesus is, this is what the Gospel is: changing sadness into joy. Our human nature is sad. Jesus comes to bring joy amidst the sadness, convert it gradually, and then have joy claim all in the Church of Heaven: the Nativity, daily life in Nazareth, the Wedding at Cana, the Preaching and the Miracles, the Transfiguration, the Paschal Mystery from the Eucharist to the Resurrection. In all things of the Gospel, there is sadness changing into joy, suffering into beatitude. To change sadness into joy is at the heart of the Gospel and of the contemplative life.

This truth was known and asserted beautifully by Saint Francis de Sales and his friend Saint Jane de Chantal. Saint Jane writes of Francis’ teaching to her Visitandine sisters:

I know of no greater happiness than that of the recollected soul, the soul of prayer who knows how to act with God. She has found, our blessed Father [Francis de Sales] used to say, the sacred alchemy that changes all her miseries into the gold of a most ardent charity, and of lasting heavenly consolations: there is no joy, she knows from experience, equal to the joy of living with God alone, she and God alone, detached from all created things.

This sacred alchemy changes suffering into love, in which there is joy without equal. No matter the suffering, in the “fine point”, the height, or the depth, of our soul, we can curl up next to Jesus: little Jesus, Jesus the teacher, Jesus at the Last Supper, Jesus on Good Friday, Jesus risen from the dead. And as Jane notes, this is a matter of prayer: prayer in times of prayer, prayer on the road, prayer when suffering in any way whatsoever. It is a matter of going to where the Son is. He’s on the Cross. (His whole life he knew it would be so; every moment of his life realized in us and looked on by us can have this dimension of the Cross.) But where else is he? He’s dwelling, in a royal tabernacle, in the deepest part of every human heart in the state of grace. Enter in, find him there, says Saint Jane; change sadness into joy, for that is the Gospel.

Some related posts:

• Changing Sadness into Joy
• What is the “Joy” into which Suffering is Changed?
• Sadness, Go Away