Letter #77: Serious Business
The holy solemnities of joy.
Darth Vater,
Welcome home! I hear the Germans took to singing “foreigners out!” in large crowds of blue-eyed youth right around the time you headed over there. I won’t ask what you did to provoke this reaction, but I’m glad you and Mom made it home without having to pose as the conductors of an adorable children’s choir in tiny Lederhosen. I’ve seen how that movie ends.
It’s somehow so easy to forget about joy, the fruit and summit of all the virtues. It’s the point of everything but also the first thing to vanish when things get serious. You can see it in all our politics now, how grim and sonorous we become as soon as we care deeply about something.
In any given debate, I often find that all parties—the ones I agree with and the ones I disagree with—are plodding grimly, teeth clenched, through a rehearsal of values that sounds about as much fun as a dental care procedure. There’s a cult classic movie from the early Aughts in which a born-again high schooler whacks her nemesis with a Bible and shouts, “I am FILLED with Christ’s love!!” That’s about the caliber of evangelism, secular as well as religious, that I see happening online.
One reason for this might be our general impression that if we’re not angry, we’re not serious. Our assumption is that if you’re attuned to the many abominations afflicting our world, you’ll naturally go around in a state of constant depression. That’s how solemnity becomes a measure of virtue.
What’s really interesting is, that’s not even what the word “solemnity” was originally supposed to mean. In Church Latin, “sollemnis” just means “fixed on an appointed date,” like a feast on the liturgical calendar. So you can have a solemn funeral, but also a solemn carnival, if both are observed in the appropriate season and carried out with grand rituals fitting the occasion.
It’s so telling that over time, “solemn” came to be restricted to sad occasions like funerals and days of mourning. We think you can only be serious about grief. The disastrous knock-on effect is that when we hear there’s a Christian obligation to rejoice, we end up affecting this silly frozen smile, as if we were supposed to be happy all the time. But the church fathers knew you could sing in the season for singing, and weep in the season for weeping, all with the high solemnity of joy. It’s a state of mind that hovers like a bird with wings outstretched over the full variety of human existence, from the gruesome realities of war to the giddy dance of love.
All I can say about that kind of joy is it radiates unmistakably off some people like fluorescent light. You know them when you meet them, not because they’re unserious but because they’re truly serious, about hilarity and suffering alike. Maybe all the other virtues are just signposts toward that happy state.
Love,
Spencer
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One of our family mottos is: "Seriousness is not a virtue." From GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy. His longer piece on the topic is very appropriate to this letter too:
"Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
Spencer, thank you for this. I wonder if our forebears in the faith knew something that we don’t (actually I don’t wonder about it all). It is necessary to set times for the focus on joy. To solemnly practice joy may simply mean that we recognize that we are not naturally prone to it. The “pursuit of happiness” does not equal finding joy and could very well get in the way. What if joy is a virtue that begins as a gift? What if gratitude and humility are necessary prerequisites? Anyway, that’s what your excellent blog prompted in me.