Joy under all circumstances

By Teresita McCormick

March 25, 2026

Teresita with young people on retreat.

In May 2025 I joined Vagabond Missions. I felt drawn to the opportunity to invite those far from Christ into a relationship with him. St. Katherine Drexel said: "If we wish to serve God and love our neighbor well, we must manifest our joy in the service we render to Him and them. Let us open wide our hearts. It is joy which invites us. Press forward and fear nothing."

I couldn't help but laugh at being asked to reflect on this quote because an ongoing question I was just wrestling with is how to respond to the Gospel's exhortation to rejoice always and count it all joy. I'm reminded of what Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl attested to; it is not the attainment of an emotional happiness which most truly drives and fulfills man, but that of meaning. The Good News is that the deepest meaning of our lives IS attainable in Christ. We are afraid when we believe our meaning will elude us...yet neither "death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things" (Rm 8:38)...nothing can keep us from the God who is the Fulfillment of all desire when we give our will to Him.

That fact is more than enough cause for the kind of rejoicing that can never be taken away by something as powerless as the day's pains. From Romans 8:18-30 we recognize that left to itself creation groans under the bondage of being completely incapable of reaching its meaning; yet by living in the Spirit we will be set free in Christ to attain that meaning in the freedom of being children of God.

The Spirit convicts us to stake our lives in the present exile on the fact that "love of God and neighbor" is all that matters in the last analysis. We do not pursue the bread of happiness which will leave us hungry but learn to say with Jesus “My food is to do the will of him who sent me." (Jn 4:34). It was "For the joy that was set before him [that Jesus] endured the cross (Heb 12:2). The Spirit alone can give us the gift of that kind of Joy by which we "open wide our hearts" and "press on without fear" toward the light of Christ which will be ours if we seek Him. This is why we can get up and show up everyday, and why, when a young person walks in the door, no matter what they bring with them, we can greet them with excitement.