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Life can feel pretty burdensome sometimes — especially in the middle of a work week. Even when we find the strength to persevere, it can still feel like something is missing in our lives.
Often that missing ingredient is something very simple yet hard to come by … joy.
When our lives are joyless, we feel tempted to desperately seek after joy in pleasure and self-indulgence. Even Friedrich Nietzsche recognized this when he said:
The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.
The fact is that no amount of worldly fun, thrills, or pleasure will ever truly answer our need for joy.
And yet, as C.S. Lewis assures us in his book The Great Divorce:
No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.
Where then can we find the door that leads to joy?
In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton writes:
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.
With that in mind, we are sharing the above video from our DailyMotion archive, highlighting four great saints who lived their lives with extraordinary joy. By following their example, may we also be inspired to enter that narrow door that leads to true joy!
We invite you to share the joyful saints who inspire you in the comments section below.
And today we celebrate...