Lift up your hearts: the joy of solemnity

In 2023, the world watched as Charles III and his wife Camilla, in an extraordinary and elaborate ceremony, were crowned king and queen of the United Kingdom and the 14 realms that come under the Commonwealth. When the coronation broadcast appeared on the TV screen of comedy legend John Cleese, he says he burst into uproarious laughter. Why? According to Cleese in an interview during his recent Australian tour, the idea of everybody taking this ceremony so seriously, and treating it with such solemnity, was funny.

For Cleese, solemnity cannot co-exist with a sense of humour. ‘You must never be solemn,’ he said. ‘You must be serious, and if you’re serious, you can have a sense of humour.’

Generally speaking, it might be unwise to take instruction from a comedian on these finer philosophical distinctions, but there is something here, however thin, that echoes something CS Lewis once said. While we must play, Lewis observed, ‘our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption’ (The Weight of Glory, 1941).

Still, Cleese’s comment does raise a question worth pondering. If solemnity cannot co-exist with comedy—and therefore, in some sense, with joy—what are we to do with Catholic liturgy?

In Catholic liturgy, the highest form of celebration is the solemnity, and we have many of them. They often celebrate various saints, the Blessed Virgin Mary or particular dogmas of the Church. Following the Easter season, there is a series of solemnities that form a kind of bridge between Easter and the Sundays in ‘Ordinary Time’ (Ascension, Pentecost, Corpus Christi and Trinity Sunday). They are meant to be grand affairs, high points in our liturgical festivities. Especially in a cathedral—which, as the mother church of a diocese, models liturgical celebrations for everyone else—it is uniquely fitting to bring out all the ‘smells and bells’.

But it is a curious question. Why do we, as Catholics, associate solemnity with celebration, and thus with joy? After all, John Cleese isn’t the only one to turn his nose up at the idea of solemnity; there are many who see it as off-putting or too sombre for a faith that is meant to ‘always be joyful’ (1 Thessalonians 5:16).

We willingly lift up our hearts, a sacrifice of joy and thanksgiving, recognising who it is who is about to come among us ... It is this kind of joy that endures when the dopamine wears off ... that can endure, or break in, even in the midst of darkness.

The first thing to say would be that the concept of joy, in the truest sense of the term, is so much deeper and wider than mere humour. Many thinkers and psychologists have touched on this point, arguing how superficial (not to mention dopamine-addled) our understanding of ‘happiness’ is today. But joy is very easy to grasp, conceptually. St Thomas Aquinas understood the true cause of joy as being in the presence of that which we love (Summa Theologiae, II-II:28:1). In this way, it is the opposite of sorrow: we grieve over the loss of something good, or something we love; on the other hand, we rejoice when we discover it or come into possession of it.

One of the ways we experience this joy is as a kind of sursum corda—a Latin phrase meaning ‘lifted hearts’. Joy lifts our hearts, giving us an elevated sense of being that is much richer and deeper than any kind of dopamine hit. This was why, after the Ascension, the disciples could return to Jerusalem ‘rejoicing’ (Luke 24:51–53). Despite Christ’s departure, their hearts were (and would be in a deeper way through the Holy Spirit) united with him, truly ‘lifted up’ with the one they loved.

The sursum corda is also one of the oldest parts of the liturgy, going back to (at least) the third century. As the priest begins the Eucharistic Prayer, he says, ‘Lift up your hearts,’ to which the people respond, ‘We lift them up to the Lord.’ The fact that the sursum corda comes before the consecration is also interesting: we willingly lift up our hearts, a sacrifice of joy and thanksgiving, recognising who it is who is about to come among us—the presence of the one we love, our heart’s true desire. It is this kind of joy that endures when the dopamine wears off; it is this kind of joy that can endure, or break in, even in the midst of darkness.

A consequence of this understanding of joy is that if our joy has grown cold, it is only because something much deeper has grown cold, too: our love.

The joy we experience in the presence of true love—that sursum corda—is by no means at odds with solemnity. In fact, precisely because solemnity is an expression of love, it can increase our joy; it can make it easier for us to lift our hearts.

Even when the liturgy celebrates particular saints or dogmas, its grandness is meant to heighten our awareness of the pricelessness of the gifts we have been given. They are, after all, the unveiling of God’s own heart ...

In Luke’s Gospel, a woman anoints the feet of Jesus in the household of Simon the Pharisee and is criticised for the wasteful extravagance of her actions. But in his response, Jesus makes it clear that the woman ‘wasteful’ gesture was a one of deep love, a response to the deep forgiveness she had experienced (Luke 7:26–50). It was also a gesture of deep reverence and even solemnity. The word solemnity, while always having religious and ceremonial overtones, derives from the Latin sollus, meaning ‘whole’ or ‘unbroken’ or ‘well kept’. It is about maintaining the integrity of the thing attended to, about ‘keeping it well’. The woman knew who Jesus was and anointed him accordingly. She did not treat him as any other man.

St John Paul II used this image of the anointing as a way into understanding the liturgy: ‘Like the woman who anointed Jesus in Bethany, the Church has feared no “extravagance”, devoting the best of her resources to expressing her wonder and adoration before the unsurpassable gift of the Eucharist’ (Ecclesia de eucharistia, §48).

In fact, he warned against a certain temptation to trivialise this intimacy, writing:

Though the idea of a ‘banquet’ naturally suggests familiarity, the Church has never yielded to the temptation to trivialise this ‘intimacy’ with her Spouse by forgetting that he is also her Lord and that the ‘banquet’ always remains a sacrificial banquet marked by the blood shed on Golgotha.

Everything the Church does through the liturgy is meant to evoke the grandeur and the mystery—and the intimacy—of what happens there, of what it means to have the presence of Christ in our midst.

Even when the liturgy celebrates particular saints or dogmas, its grandness is meant to heighten our awareness of the pricelessness of the gifts we have been given. They are, after all, the unveiling of God’s own heart, who comes down to speak with us heart to heart. To ‘keep well’ those mysteries is a sure way to also keep well our joy.