Tuesday, August 4, 2020       Memorial of Saint John Vianney    (today’s lectionary)
There be joy
Jean Baptiste-Marie Vianney, born in 1786, grew up in post-Revolutionary France. At 13 he made his first communion and prepared for confirmation in secrecy. Then after the Catholic Church was reestablished he was drafted into Napoleon’s army. Like Dr. Zhivago, he became sick and walked away, hid with other alienated soldiers, and started a school in the mountains.
He realized how the Revolution had prevented many young people from becoming Christians. After becoming a priest, he became well-known for the endless hours he spent hearing confessions and giving direction to those who came to him. A hundred years before the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 and the resulting explosion afterward that we call the Roaring Twenties, John’s people also danced and were indifferent to religion. He told them to stop dancing and take their religion seriously.
What a character! He ran from the army, then he ran four times from the parish where he was priest, wanting instead to be a monk. But always he returned to his dancing people, drawn by the spiritual and physical needs. He loved them.
This Jean Vianney sounds so much like Jeremiah. Unhappy with whatever was given him, and then at last as God finally relieved him of his dirge, he relaxed into the autumn of his life with poetry from God about the blessings. Not however, without one final reminder of the sin.
Why cry over your wound?
Your pain is without relief.
Because of your great guilt and your numerous sins
I have done this to you.
On Sunday our teacher Rick Williams, spoke about his “life verse,” Psalm 78.
“The Lord awoke as if from sleep … and beat back his enemies, put them to everlasting shame.”
We have listened, along with Jeremiah, to the Lord’s description of sin and suffering in the lives of the Israelites. We know how caught we are in the same unwariness and arrogance, and wonder how we too will be brought to task and made to pay.
But then the Lord awoke as if from sleep!
Suddenly we are rescued, without merit, Â by the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. We are surprised by joy. As was Jeremiah:
See! I will restore …
City shall be rebuilt upon hill and palace made whole as it was.
Happy men will laugh and sing songs of praise
Many men, not few, and his sons shall be as of old.
You shall be my people
And I will be your God.
Rick, who teaches history and is a Tolkien scholar, told us the author of Lord of the Rings coined a word for this experience. Add eu (Latin for “good”) to catastrophe, and you get “eucatastrophe,” which then means a “sudden joyous turn” encountered without cause or merit in a story of disaster and dismay. Tim Willard further explains that this unexpected joy is not the result of anything the characters do for themselves:
This sudden turn does not deny a sudden failure by the protagonist. Rather it denies universal final defeat and in so far is “evangelium”, or in Old English “godspel,” giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, as poignant as grief.”
In 1931 soon after a midnight walk with Tolkien, C.S. Lewis gave himself up to Christianity. The  friends rejoiced together in God’s plan with the Christ Story to “smuggle Joy past the watchful dragons” of the world, thereby extending the narrative of hope into a hopeless world. Eucatastrophe is at the center of salvation, unexpected, unearned, and providing us a sudden joyous turn.
Those of us who continue to experience the fruit of this turn in our own lives know exactly what the two Oxford dons discussed on their midnight walk down the rainy streets. And how they might have leapt for joy at the end of the walk, and clicked their heels.
 (Jeremiah 30, Psalm 102, John 1, Matthew 14)
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