The required cheerfulness that characterizes many of our churches produces a suffocating environment of pat, religious answers to the painful, complex questions that riddle the lives of hurting people.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We all want to feel spiritually vigorous, and we hurt when we don't. This pain is intensified for people who lead church ministries.
At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome.
Cheerfulness is a very great help in fostering the virtue of charity. Cheerfulness itself is a virtue.
The Church is like a great tree whose roots must be energetically anchored in the earth while its leaves are serenely exposed to the bright sunlight. In this way, she sums up a whole gamut of beats in a single living and all-embracing act, each one of which corresponds to a particular degree or a possible form of spiritualisation.
An ounce of cheerfulness is worth a pound of sadness to serve God with.
There is inestimable blessing in a cheerful spirit. When the soul throws its windows wide open, letting in the sunshine, and presenting to all who see it the evidence of its gladness, it is not only happy, but it has an unspeakable power of doing good.
The secular world looks to the church and to its chagrin, finds no love, no life, no laughter, no hope and no happiness.
The joy which answers to prayer give, cannot be described; and the impetus which they afford to the spiritual life is exceedingly great.
Liturgy is like a strong tree whose beauty is derived from the continuous renewal of its leaves, but whose strength comes from the old trunk, with solid roots in the ground.
Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.