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How can we be happy when so much is going wrong? Catholic faith taught Mark Twain how and it can teach us too.
We are praying and fasting for peace in the Holy Land, and celebrating birthdays, we are worried about Ukraine, and posting back to school pictures, we are worried about crime and deportations, and hosting cheerful dinner parties.
It feels like we shouldn’t be light-hearted with so many problems facing so many people in the world. But Mark Twain learned a lesson from Catholic saints that helped him take a different approach.
Famously, 144 years ago, Mark Twain said he wouldn’t tell jokes when the nation faced a tragedy.
On August 23, 1881, Samuel Clemens — Mark Twain — turned down a speaking engagement in Ashfield, Massachusetts, he said, because the President of the United States was dying.
“Bad news began to come from Washington again; so bad, indeed, and so utterly hopeless, that we began to look, hourly, for the President's death,” he explained. “The idea of making a light and nonsensical speech … was appalling.”
President James Garfield was shot on July 2 in a Washington train station by a lawyer who had lost his mind; however the president didn’t die from his wounds (and botched medical treatment) until 79 days later.
Americans followed the story with shocked attention. In her book about the assassination, Candice Millard explains how, after all of America’s successes, Garfield's shooting “revealed to the American people how vulnerable they were. … The course of their lives could be changed in an instant, by a man who did not even understand what he had done.”
Twain’s decision was a big deal. He made most of his money from his lectures — which were part comedy routine, part curmudgeonly philosophy — and he badly needed money.
He wouldn’t do it, though, he said, and we know how he feels. It often feels wrong to celebrate when so many are in misery. But Twain, who so often complained about Christianity, and churchgoers, had a very different view from the saints.
The saints find joy in all circumstances.
The words “A sad saint is a sorry saint,” are often attributed to St. Francis de Sales, but what we know he said was:
“It is a mistake, then, to think that devotion consists in a bitter, melancholy, and unpleasant temper … True devotion, on the contrary, makes the heart sweet, affable, and joyful.”
The joy he describes comes not from optimism, but from hope. Optimism may often be proved wrong, but hope does not disappoint.
To hope is to trust God, and to trust God is like trusting a kind father who leads you through darkness. It is like holding on to your father’s shirt in the darkness while he leads you — or, as the Book of Hebrews puts it:
“Hope is the ‘sure and steadfast anchor of the soul . . . that enters . . . where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf.”
It is this hope that fills the saints with joy, even in the hardest of circumstances.
Later in life a Catholic saint changed Mark Twain’s opinion.
Later in life, Mark Twain wrote, “Now listen to what an old man tells you. My best book is my Recollections of Joan of Arc ... it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing.”
In the book, Twain describes the dark times Joan faced:
“When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night.”
He lists the ways she stood out, including: “She was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue … she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule … she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things … she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation.”
Hers is the spirit of hope that is needed in every dark age, including our own.
