The Cruel Religion of Cheerfulness

"Your father made a religion of cheerfulness. I suppose there can be nothing more hellish than never for an instant being allowed to frown or to shed tears or to be bad tempered. No one in this house inspector was permitted the luxury of unhappiness. I'm not surprised that you yourself broke down and became ill. Everlasting good humor, eternal happiness, eternal joyousness? Not even Lucifer himself could devise such torment! And it was worse for him, he was a public figure! Alcohol Armstrong - condemned always to wear the smiling mask like an actor forever doomed to play the same part. When he discovered that his wife was unfaithful, don't you think that we wanted to weep and to rant and to rage against the fates!?" said Father Brown.

"No, he never did!" 

"No, of course he didn't! No, cheerfulness is cruel religion. Are you surprised that he relapsed and once again took to drink? I know I'm guessing. I don't know to what extent, or when it happened, or who if anyone shared his secret. But he was a man of principle inspector! The hypocrisy of it must have preyed on his mind! In private he was a victim of the very vice that he denounced in public." 

From Father Brown Mysteries, The Three Tools of Death. 

I'm a big G.K. Chesterton fan.  His book Orthodoxy is one of those books that influenced me so deeply that things I thought I had thought of I realized were just Chesterton quotes when I read Orthodoxy for the second time! Lately I found a British television rendition of a mystery series that Chesterton wrote about a Catholic Priest called Father Brown. I love watching it! I grew up watching BBC mysteries with my mom like Poirot, Agatha Christi, and Sherlock Holmes. 

In this quote from the episode I watched tonight, Chesterton marks Cheerfulness as a cruel religion. I grew up in a culture of performance, of niceness over honesty, of keeping up appearances. What a burden it is: the need to feel like I am 'good' all the time. I know better. 

Father Brown knows better because Chesterton knew better. Chesterton knew better because Jesus knew better. Christianity is a religion that gives dignity and power to suffering and to grief. Times of grief for me are now bearing fruit from seed that only suffering could have sown. Our Lord is too kind to mandate unceasing happiness. He loves us too much to inflict a perpetual and empty optimism. He is well acquainted with grief and a man of sorrows himself. "The worst disease of them all is to think that one is quite well," says Father Brown.