“Present Blessings:” No Gloom Allowed for the Christian

Many non-Christians today are under the impression that religion consists of burdensome rules that are not only unnecessary, but even damaging. The truth, of course, is that the easy and light yoke of Christ opens us to divine vistas of beatitude beyond our imagining. St. John Henry Newman offers a firm, inflexible rule that is neither burdensome nor unnecessary: the Christian is not allowed to be gloomy. Newman’s sermon “Present Blessings,” preached sometime in 1839, exemplifies the Christian duty, and real ability in Christ, to be joyful no matter what. The passing emotion of sadness or discouragement does not abrogate joy. Neither do sorrows, even those of lasting and difficult nature. Newman notes that sorrows, trials, losses, and other hard experiences happen upon life, a life already and still given. They are not themselves the substance of life, which remains intact as a fundamental gift. Further, whatever happens visibly, we always have the gift of the Giver of gifts who is invisible, and he is the real and only source of joy. “His absence only is a cause for sorrow.” The prospect of hell and unredeemed sin, by our own choice, would be the only real condition for a fundamental lack of joy, a joy that in Christ is readily available, that would be withdrawn only by our own grim choice—perhaps, too often, our very unwillingness to give up our gloominess. 

Newman may have appreciated C.S. Lewis’ depiction of the damned in his small classic The Great Divorce. Whereas for Dante hell becomes more and more cramped at its lowest pit, hell is a vast and ever-expanding waste in Lewis’ mind, because the damned are so gloomy that they move farther and farther away from each other, preferring to remain isolated and eternally brooding over their petty attachments. Napoleon Bonaparte is a particularly sad example, who for all eternity marches back and forth in his room muttering over how he really should not have lost the Battle of Waterloo. Truly, Lewis imagines the damned as those who will not give up their gloominess, as if their regrets and past sins and nostalgias are more real to them than God Himself, his mercies and forgiveness and promises.

But the Christian is marked by ever moving forward from “light into light.” God’s mercy abounds for the very worst of sinners: 

“Our sins are more in number than the hairs of our head; yet even the hairs of our head are all numbered by Him. He counts our sins, and, as He counts, so can He forgive; for that reckoning, great though it be, comes to an end; but His mercies fail not, and His Son’s merits are infinite.”

If we remember that the word grace most literally means gift, we can say that God’s abundant graces to us pervade and saturate every detail of our lives. Newman lays out five fundamental gifts that provide reasons for constant, infinite joy: 

1. The Gift of Life—food, shelter, and temporal blessings that, even after temporary deprivations, are promised in the Gospel and born out in the Old Testament stories of Patriarchs. After trials will come refreshment, after fasting feasting; modest abstinence from life’s blessings sharpens our view of their enjoyment and right use.
2. The Gift of sleep—I share Newman’s love for the balm of sleep. He calls it a  “holy-day time, like children at school, in an unknown and mysterious country.” Truly, sleep at the end of each day arrives like a very small vacation—and it is free, open to rich and poor alike. No matter what the day brings, we can find literal rest and comfort in the gift of sleep.
3. The Gift of Christian Brotherhood—God does not leave us alone. Following Christ may require leaving behind certain friendships, but that loss will be recovered:  “He began our life anew [in the Church], but He built it up upon the same foundations; and as He did not strip us of our body, when He made us Christians, neither did He of social ties.” No one can be a Christian on their own. They are incorporated into a Body that shares many mutual blessings, temporal and divine. 
4. The Gift of Religious Freedom—speaking of his own time and place, he remarks at how easily Christians can live in the modern world compared to times and places of hostility. While our culture today is largely indifferent to religion, we nonetheless cannot deny that we enjoy an unprecedented level of religious “freedom of speech and action.”
5. The Gift of Worship and the Eucharist—most importantly, we have God Himself in sacramental form. We receive from God the way He wills for us to worship Him: by the sacrifice of His Son made present in the Eucharist. We can “day after day, quietly and calmly, kneel before our Maker… week after week, we can meet our Lord and Savior.” In the Eucharist He gives Himself to us, pours “forth milk and honey for our sustenance, though we [see] Him not. Surely we have all, and abound: we are full.” For what more can we ask? Christ has over-abundantly kept his promise to be with us “even to the end of the age,” (Matt. 28L:20), body, blood, soul and divinity, giving Himself to us as food as he said he would (John 6:53-55), which St. Paul clarifies is indeed happening in reception of the Eucharist (1 Cor. 10:16-17). How quickly bringing this sublime fact of the Gospel to mind dispels all gloom even as sorrows abound! Christ has not, and will never, leave us alone.

At the end of a long poem chronicling a man attempting to flee from God, poet Francis Thompson wonders, “Is my gloom, after all, / Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?” Newman would say yes: gloominess arises from our ungrateful selves turned away from God, but turning toward him bathes us in his light. We may experience sorrow, sadness, and suffering on a human level, and even just punishments or desolations from God on a divine level. But none of this is reason for gloom; our fundamental joy cannot be taken away. All things call us to the loving embrace of God, who does nothing and allows nothing except what will bring about our salvation and holiness. Sorrow and desolation are no excuse for gloominess; joy is the perennial fruit of the Christian.