The Charity of Cheerfulness

A forgotten virtue

One of the great beauties - but also difficulties - in the spiritual life is that there are few absolute rules in almost all everyday decisions. Of course, there are rules, but they can almost always be suspended, delayed, or even changed because of circumstances. This is why the virtue of prudence is called the charioteer of all virtues: all virtues can be misapplied, even charity. Prudence applies our absolute rules or principles to particular cases: it is the art of making good decisions. 

Still, there is a virtue that should be practiced, almost always, and that virtue is the theme of this brief essay. I started thinking about it when I was invited to Washington D.C. to preach to a group of Missionaries of Charity. While wandering around the center, I noticed a wall poster with the number 2 of their  Constitutions. It read: “Loving trust, total surrender, and cheerfulness.” I thought, “Now, that is a good plan for life.” So, I prepared part of this talk.

Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta said to her sisters: Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love, or more simply, Always have a cheerful smile. That “always” must mean “almost always” because, as St. Paul writes in Romans 12:15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. But I would say “almost always,” or something like: in the ordinary circumstances of life, 98% of the time, we should apply Mother Teresa’s suggestion. Even more precisely, she probably meant “always be cheerful.”

I agree with Mother Teresa’s statements. Being cheerful and smiling is one of the best things we can always do in the spiritual life, which is good for others and also for us. The opposite is also true: pouting, being “the rain on everyone’s parade,” is devastating for a family or small community, as anyone who has such a member in their group knows.

So, let us look at how cheerfulness is good for others and good for us, too.

1)       First of all, cheerfulness is good for others: We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do, said Mother Teresa. Why is this true? One way to understand this comes from St. Thomas Aquinas. In Latin, St. Thomas used the word affabilitas, (affability) for what we would usually call cheerfulness. For him, affability was a virtue. In traditional Catholic anthropology, all human virtues are tied to one of the four cardinal virtues. At first, it seems surprising, but St. Thomas places affability under the cardinal virtue of justice! Why? Justice is the virtue that prompts us to give to others what is their due, or, in its succinct Latin description, suum cuique. So St. Thomas reasoned this way: being cheerful and affable is a way of being just towards others. Since we are obliged to help and not hinder others around us in the world on their way toward heaven, being cheerful is a help to others, while being despondent or sad is a great discouragement. Cheerfulness is a testimony that life is good despite whatever is happening. It is good because we have true hope in God’s providence that is always there to help us and finally conquer. In this sense, cheerfulness is not based on an upbeat temperament; the cheerfulness we speak about is based on hope. St. Damien of Molokai is one example: Having the Lord at my side, I continue to be happy with cheerfulness of heart and a smile on my lips. To quote Mother Teresa again: “For the first time in 11 years, I have come to love the darkness, for I believe that it is a part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on Earth… Today I felt a deep joy that Jesus can’t go through the agony anymore, but that He wants to go through it in me.” In the worst of situations, they both could smile, not because things were going well, but because they had hope, and so they knew that what they had to suffer had meaning.  

So cheerfulness for the good of others – out of justice to others – is not just the effect of a jolly character; it is our duty. That’s why a strong soul is a cheerful soul. St. Francis de Sales wrote, “We should contribute to a holy and temperate joy and to pleasant conversation, which may serve as a consolation and recreation to our neighbor so as not to annoy him with our knit brows.” And Paul Claudel, the 20^th Century French poet, dramatist, diplomat, and fervent Catholic, said, “Tell them their only duty is cheerfulness! Because joy is the sign that we love God, and thus we do a great good for others and ourselves. We must be happy, and others should know that we are.” Being cheerful thus is being an apostle, an evangelizer, or, as St. John Paul II once wrote, a prophet: Every time you overcome temptations to discouragement, every time you show a cheerful, generous, and patient spirit, you bear witness to that Kingdom – which is yet to come in its fullness – in which we shall be healed of every infirmity and freed from every sorrow.

2)       Secondly, being cheerful is also good for ourselves and our spiritual lives. In 2 Cor 9:7, St. Paul says that each must do as already determined, without sadness or compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. Why? Because he knows that being cheerful encourages not only others but also ourselves. As the book of Sirach 30:22 says: Gladness of heart is the very life of man; cheerfulness prolongs his days.

An excellent example of this is what I call “smile therapy.” I learned it while working at a small boys’ boarding school in France. I discovered, not through books, but by simple experience, that if you smile on the outside, you will soon be smiling on the inside. In that school, my office was where a boy would be sent when, because of anger, sadness, or destructive behavior, no one knew what to do with him. But I learned that if that boy would leave my office smiling or laughing, I had won: the problem was solved. But imagine how pleased I was when I explained my experiential theory to a professional therapist, and he told me that I was correct: any good therapist knew that same principle, and it worked. Some years later, I was again confirmed while reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Peterson wrote: Alterations in body language offer an important example. If you are asked by a researcher to move your facial muscles, one at a time, into a position that would look sad to an observer, you will report feeling sadder. If you are asked to move the muscles one by one into a position that looks happy, you will report feeling happier. Emotion is partly bodily expression and can be amplified (or dampened) by that expression. (That came from a psychological study done in 1998, “Effects of self-generated facial expressions on mood,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)

  St. Philip Neri, a very joyful saint, put it this way: The true way to advance in holy virtues is to persevere in holy cheerfulness. St. Teresa of Avila’s lapidary phrase once again reiterates the same principle: A saint who is sad is one sad saint! (¡Un santo triste es un triste santo!)        

All of what I have written may very well be true, but what should we do if we are sad? First, remember: cheerfulness, as we are speaking of it, is a virtue and not that natural cheerfulness that comes from temperament, external circumstances, or some combination of both. Some people are just naturally upbeat. But cheerfulness is a virtue, a “habitual disposition towards the good,” and virtues can and should be formed through a usually slow and patient process of habit building. In fact, cheerfulness can and should coexist even with sorrow, as mentioned above, in the lives of several saints. As the Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand wrote in his book “Transformation in Christ,” The largest obstacle to cheerfulness isn’t sorrow but pride. And St. James supplies us with practical advice in his letter, 5:13: “Is anyone of you sad? Let him pray.” So, the first thing to remember when one feels sad is that we can overcome it, and humility and prayer are excellent helpmates in this work.   

          Secondly, let us quite simply remember “smile therapy.” Force yourself to smile; help others to smile. Then, you will be well on your way to a cheerful disposition.

Thirdly, St. Thomas Aquinas also taught five surprising remedies for sadness in his Summa Theologiae (I–II, q. 38): In Latin, they are quite succinct, but let us develop them a little. (Primo, utrum dolor vel tristitia mitigetur per quamlibet delectationem. Secundo, utrum mitigetur per fletum. Tertio, utrum per compassionem amicorum. Quarto, utrum per contemplationem veritatis. Quinto, utrum per somnum et balnea.)

1.    The first remedy is granting ourselves something we like or doing things that afford us pleasure, like playing games, which bring enjoyment to the body and the soul. This remedy is classified as a genuine virtue (in Greek, it is called eutrapelia, and we don’t have a perfect translation.) St. Thomas Aquinas viewed eutrapelia positively, favoring the Aristotelian notion that it is constituted by mental relaxation and honorable fun. The Gospels also testify to this since Jesus took part joyfully in banquets and feasts and, before and after his Resurrection, enjoyed the noble and good things in life. Psalm 104:15 even says that wine gladdens the human heart!

2.    The second remedy is weeping. St. Thomas wrote, “A hurtful thing hurts yet more if we keep it shut up because the soul is more intent on it: whereas if it is allowed to escape, the soul’s intention is dispersed as it were on outward things so that the inward sorrow is lessened.” Jesus, too, wept. And Pope Francis once said, “Certain truths in life can only be seen with eyes cleansed by tears.”

3.    The third remedy is sharing our sorrow with a friend. I recall here the friend of Renzo in Manzoni’s great novel The Betrothed. Finding himself alone in his deserted home ravaged by the plague and mourning his family’s horrible fate, he tells Renzo: “What has happened is horrible, something that I never thought I would live to see; it’s enough to take away a person’s joy for the rest of his life. But speaking about these things with a friend is a great help.” When we are sad, we tend to see everything in tints of gray. So, an effective antidote is opening our hearts to a friend (or, if you have such luck, a good spiritual director or therapist.)

4.    The fourth remedy against sadness is contemplating the truth. Contemplating the “fulgor veritatis,” St. Augustine speaks of the splendor of truth in nature or a work of art or music, which can be an effective balm against sadness. A literary critic, a few days after the death of a dear friend, was scheduled to speak at a conference about the topic of adventure in the works of Tolkien. He began by saying: “Speaking about beautiful things to people interested in them is, for me, a real consolation.”

5.    The fifth remedy suggested by St. Thomas is perhaps something we wouldn’t expect from a medieval thinker. The theologian says that bathing and sleeping are wonderful remedies against sadness! It’s a profoundly Christian viewpoint that to alleviate a spiritual malady, one must sometimes resort to a bodily remedy. Since God became Man and took on a body, the separation between matter and spirit has been overcome in our world.

I apologize for the rhetorical tone of this essay, but it was originally penned to be given as a talk and not a polished piece of writing. But let that be. Let us summarize. Being cheerful is not just being jolly or having an upbeat or optimistic character. Being cheerful is being just and knowing how to submit our negative feelings to our Christian virtue of hope. It is a manly virtue that helps others and ourselves on our brief journey to heaven. Permitting ourselves to be sad, discouraged, or depressed is a kind of “spiritual sensuality” that we all must flee. And when we do feel sad, remember humility, prayer, “smile therapy,” and the five wonderful remedies of St. Thomas Aquinas.