Canter Bridge

A strong habit of mind suggests that you cannot command love and you cannot command joy. One enjoys no mandate over one’s feelings. What one feels, according to this usually unquestioned view, simply is what it is.

To attempt control over the nature and course of one’s emotions is to spit into the wind. Worse, it is a genuine betrayal of the self-evident authenticity of feeling.

This is the triumph of one of Romanticism’s central doctrines long after the movement itself has passed from the scene as a recognizable historical moment.

Our emotions, it would seem, rule us. Costly as the human tragedy of this way of living might be, it claims the merits of an honest, engaged, authentically human honesty.

The apostle Paul would not find this persuasive. Witness one of most quoted aphorisms:

Finally, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you is not troublesome to me, and for you it is a safeguard.

Paul has drunk deeply of the Jewish legacy regarding what it means to be human. Beyond this, he has come under the sway of a Jesus movement whose inspiring leader by all accounts knew a deep and powerful emotional life, yet chose not to embrace its untamed course as a given.

So Paul can urge his readers, without evidence of apology for the notion, to choose to rejoice. The apostle privileges decision over consequence. He dares to find in the new human race that he considers to have been inaugurated in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, a mandate for supremacy over despair if not over unhappiness. He believes that his fellow Christian believers can choose to rejoice, indeed that a kind of Christian duty urges this choice upon them as a credible responsibility.

This writer finds in the discipline of expressing gratitude to his Creator with each morning’s first waking thought a powerful leverage over the heart’s tendency to interpret weariness as despair and challenge as misery.

It is a decision in favor of reality, not a psychological technique employed to fend it off. For the apostle, such a determination made ‘in the Lord’ recognizes a kind of dominical sovereignty over the soul’s darkest instincts and least helpful broodings.

This he chooses to celebrate, to advocate, even to command. He finds no burden in repeating such an odd, non-Romantic mandate, as though those most married to the primacy of uncommanded feeling were after all not the splendid advocates of sincerity whom we foolishly consider them to be.

Reality is solid after all. Our hearts are malleable and capable of apprehending it via the proper disciplines. Something in that reality, seen as it ought to be seen, properly elicits joy. Imagine.