Dear Brothers and sons and daughters, such is the joyful hope drawn from the very sources of God's Word. For twenty centuries, this source of joy has not ceased to spring up in the Church, and especially in the hearts of the saints. We must now recall some echoes of this spiritual experience; according to the diversity of charisms and particular vocations, it illustrates the mystery of Christian joy.

In the first rank is the Virgin Mary, full of grace, the Mother of the Savior. She, accepting the announcement from on high, the Servant of the Lord, Spouse of the Spirit and Mother of the Eternal Son, manifests her joy before her cousin Elizabeth who celebrates her faith: "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior...henceforth all generations will call me blessed."[⁴⁷] She has grasped, better than all other creatures, that God accomplishes wonderful things: His name is holy, He shows His mercy, He raises up the humble, He is faithful to His promises. Not that the apparent course of her life in any way departs from the ordinary, but she meditates on the least signs of God, pondering them in her heart. Not that she is in any way spared sufferings: she stands, the mother of sorrows, at the foot of the cross, associated in an eminent way with the sacrifice of the innocent Servant. But she is also open in an unlimited degree to the joy of the resurrection; and she is also taken up, body and soul, into the glory of heaven. The first of the redeemed, immaculate from the moment of her conception, the incomparable dwelling-place of the Spirit, the pure abode of the Redeemer of mankind, she is at the same time the beloved Daughter of God and, in Christ, the Mother of all. She is the perfect model of the Church both on earth and in glory. What a marvelous echo the prophetic words about the new Jerusalem find in her wonderful existence as the Virgin of Israel: "I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garment of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels."[⁴⁸] With Christ, she sums up in herself all joys; she lives the perfect joy promised to the Church: Mater plena sanctae laetitiae. And it is with good reason that her children on earth, turning to her who is the mother of hope and of grace, invoke her as the cause of their joy: Causa nostrae laetitiae.

After Mary, we find the expression of the purest and most burning joy -- where the cross of Jesus is embraced with the most faithful love -- among the martyrs, in whom, in the very midst of their torment, the Holy Spirit inspires an impassioned longing for the coming of the Spouse. Dying and seeing heaven open, Saint Stephen is but the first of the innumerable witnesses of Christ. How many there are, in our day still and in many countries, who, risking everything for Christ, could declare with the martyr Ignatius of Antioch: "It is in the fullness of life that I write to you, desiring to die. My earthly desire has been crucified, and there is no more fire in me to love matter. There is only in me a living water that murmurs and says: 'Come to the Father.'"[⁴⁹]

In the same way the strength of the Church, the certainty of her victory and her happiness in the celebration of the martyrs' combat come from the fact that she contemplates in them the glorious fruitfulness of the cross. This is the reason why our predecessor Saint Leo the Great, extolling from this Roman See the martyrdom of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, exclaims: "Precious in the eyes of God is the death of His saints, and no form of cruelty can destroy a religion founded on the mystery of the cross of Christ. The Church is not diminished but increased by persecutions. And the Lord's field is unceasingly clothed with a richer harvest, when the grains which fell alone are multiplied in their rebirth."[⁵⁰]

Nevertheless, there are many dwellings in the Father's house, and for those whose heart is consumed by the Holy Spirit many ways of dying to themselves and of coming to the holy joy of the resurrection. The shedding of blood is not the only path. Yet the combat for the kingdom necessarily includes passing through a passion of love, which the spiritual masters have spoken of in excellent ways. And here their interior experiences meet, in the very diversity of mystical traditions, in the East as in the West. They attest to the same path for the soul: per crucem ad lucem, and from this world to the Father, in the life-giving breath of the Spirit.

Each of these spiritual masters has left us a message of joy. The Fathers of the East abound in testimonies about this joy in the Holy Spirit. Origen, for example, often describes the joy of the one who has intimate knowledge of Jesus: "His soul is then inundated with joy, like that of the old Simeon. In the temple which is the Church he embraces Jesus in his arms. He enjoys the plenitude of salvation, holding Him in whom God reconciles the world to Himself."[⁵¹] In the Middle Ages, among many others, a master of spirituality in the East, Nicholas Cabasilas, endeavors to show how the love of God for Himself procures the maximum of joy[⁵²] In the West, it is sufficient to cite the names of some of those who have taught the way to holiness and joy: St. Augustine, St. Bernard, St. Dominic, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Francis de Sales and St. John Bosco.

We would like to evoke more especially three figures that are still very attractive today for the Christian people as a whole. First of all, the poor man of Assisi, in whose footsteps numbers of Holy Year pilgrims are endeavoring to follow. Having left everything for the Lord, St. Francis rediscovers through holy poverty something, so to speak, of the original blessedness, when the world came forth intact from the hands of the Creator. In the most extreme abnegation, half blind, he was able to chant the unforgettable Canticle of the Creatures, the praise of our brother the sun, of all nature, which had become transparent for him and like a pure mirror of God's glory. He could even express joy at the arrival of "our sister bodily death": "Blessed are those who will be conformed to your most holy will...."

In more recent times, St. Therese of Lisieux shows us the courageous way of abandonment into the hands of God to whom she entrusts her littleness. And yet it is not that she has no experience of the feeling of God's absence, a feeling which our century is harshly experiencing: "Sometimes it seems that the little bird (to which she compared herself) cannot believe that anything else exists except the clouds that envelop it.... This is the moment of perfect joy for the poor, weak little thing.... What happiness for it to remain there nevertheless, and to gaze at the invisible light that hides from its faith."[⁵³]

And then how could one fail to recall the luminous figure and example for our generation of Blessed Maximilian Kolbe, the authentic disciple of St. Francis? In the most tragic trials which have bloodied our age, he offered himself voluntarily to death in order to save an unknown brother, and the witnesses report that his interior peace, serenity and joy somehow transformed the place of suffering -- which was usually like an image of hell -- into the antechamber of eternal life, both for his unfortunate companions and for himself.

In the life of the Church's sons and daughters, this sharing in the joy of the Lord cannot be dissociated from the celebration of the Eucharistic mystery, at which they are nourished with His Body and Blood. For being thus sustained like travelers, on the road to eternity, they already receive sacramentally the first fruits of eschatological joy.

Situated in this perspective, the vast and profound joy infused already here below into the hearts of the truly faithful cannot but appear as "self-multiplying,'' just like the life and love of which it is a happy manifestation. Joy is the result of a human-divine communion, and aspires to a communion ever more universal. In no way can it encourage the person who enjoys it to have an attitude of preoccupation with self. Joy gives the heart a catholic openness to the world of people, at the same time that it wounds the heart with a longing for eternal bliss. Among the fervent, joy deepens their awareness of being exiles, but it guards them from the temptation to desert the place of their combat for the coming of the kingdom. It makes them hasten actively towards the heavenly consummation of the nuptials of the Lamb. It is peacefully stretched between the moment of earthly toil and the peace of the eternal dwelling, in conformity with the Spirit's force of attraction: "If then, already here below, because we have received this pledge (of the Spirit of sonship), we exclaim 'Abba, Father!' what will it be like when we shall be raised and see Him face to face? When all the members, like an immense flood, will burst forth in a hymn of exultation glorifying Him who has raised them from the dead and given them eternal life? For if simple pledges, enveloping man on all sides, already make him exclaim 'Abba, Father,' what will the full grace of the Spirit not do when it is given to men by God? It will make us like Him and will accomplish the will of the Father, for it will make man to the image and likeness of God."[⁵⁴] Already here below the saints give us a foretaste of this likeness.