To choose joy is to see all existence as a gift, which is why the practice of joy is inseparable from the practice of gratitude. Gratitude gives birth to joy because gratitude teaches us to receive life as a gift in the moment we’re in, regardless of what lies ahead. “It is the truly converted life in which God has become the center of all,”

I needed words to contain my sadness and fear. I needed comfort, but I needed the sort of comfort that doesn’t pretend that things are shiny or safe or right in the world. I needed a comfort that looked unflinchingly at loss and death. And Compline is rung round with death.

The most profound ways that we encounter God are often in affliction.

When good gifts are lost, the Giver remains—and the Giver is the ultimate source of joy to begin with, the reality to which sacramental reality points.

Our emotions are good; they are gifts from God that point us to truth. Our emotions can also be wayward and self-serving. Prayer invites us to bring our whole selves—in all our glorious complexity—to God, who knows us better than we ever will.

We come to know and trust God’s love more deeply through our own crosses, the things that make us feel we cannot go on, the things that make us tired—the

We can even use spirituality in the same way, marketing God or the spiritual life as the path of self-fulfillment and triumph, not the way of a cross.

All of us rely on the work of others.

This wasn’t the whispered doubts of skeptics, but our collective theological instruction: pray for miraculous healing, and get the will ready.