This, the third Sunday of Advent, is know as gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of rejoicing. Joy is central to the Christian vision, not the mindless guffaws of the brainless yahoo, but the confident calm the face of life, love and loss. Life is given to us as a gift; the challenge is to live life as a giver. The open hands, not the closed fist, characterises the Christian. This is our annual Christmas Mass of Giving. You all took away labels from our Giving Tree in the course of Advent. Today, our tree has borne fruit in the gifts your have purchased and brought here to be presented at the Offertory of the Mass. By Thursday next, these gifts will have been distributed to the needy in the city. This little exercise aims to highlight the Christian as 'Giver'. The exercise will do more for the Giver than the Receiver. The truth of the Franciscan prayer will be borne out: 'It is in giving that we receive.'

Gaudete Sunday is the oasis of joy in an otherwise penitential preparation. Today we lit the rose candle on the Advent Wreath. I presume you will all agree that, in your day-to-day lives, that you have experienced joy and humour as liberating. When we begin to take ourselves too seriously, humour offers is a saving distance and perspective. It gives us a clearer view of our circumstances, providing us with a healing perspective rivalled only by the healing of time.

George Bernard Shaw once said, famously, "Some people have just enough religion to make themselves miserable." I fear that there is more than an element of truth in Shaw's observation. In our tradition, religion and laughter are not happy bed-fellows. Try to get a laugh out of a average congregation on a Sunday morning, and you will soon come around to agreeing with Shaw. I would reckon that 90% of our Sunday worshippers are there, not primarily to worship, but to do their dour duty, most of them are there to fulfil the obligation rather than to celebrate their good fortune at having a man like Christ as their leader and saviour. They are labouring under the image of God as a tough task-master, a touchy, neurotic policeman whose finger points in eternal accusation, whose full-time task is to bring his creatures to book. This image is so far removed from the fun-filled, full-blooded, joyous human being who presided over the wedding feast at Cana, the person who saved the party when the wine had run out.

I suppose as children we were all given this image of God as a strict disciplinarian, a pompous Victorian figure who spelt trouble for the high-spirited and the fun-filled. If the truth were told, our parents used this figure to control us, to keep us in line in our childhood days, because they themselves had, in their turn, been kept in line through similar methods. The English poet Philip Larkin, wrote a notorious poem on the doubtful nature of this type of parental inheritance. I have sanitised the opening lines:

"They mess you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do,
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra ones just for you.!"

Larkin ends his poem with a pessimistic, if funny, piece of advice to his young readers:

"Man hands misery to man,
It deepens like a coastal shelf,
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself."

The late Cardinal Basil Hume was not so pessimistic in this regard. He gives a lovely example of this parental use of God in his autobiography. As a child, he was alone in the dining room one day. He saw this jar of sweets with a narrow neck. He squeezed his little hand into the jar and pulled out one sweet. As he was taking the paper off the sweet, his mother shouted from the next room: "Basil, God is watching you. What do you think he would he say now that he has seen you take that sweet." Years later, Basil is reflecting on this incident. He writes in the book, "Now I think I know what God would have said had he been in a position to do so. He would have said, 'Go on Basil, take two!'"

Padraig Daly is an Augustinian priest and a well-respected poet. Padraig has written a number of poems explicitly directed at undermining our inherited image of God. His most recent effort is mercifully brief and titled simply HE:

He is somewhere in the garden,
kicking up the leaves with his feet.
Nothing disturbs him.
He does not care any longer
Whether we eat the fruit or no.

Daly's poem is an invitation to kick over the traces of childhood, to ease into the maturity of an adult faith, to embrace the humour of God. But this journey from childhood is a most challenging one. We know from the scriptures the difficulties that Moses and Aaron had in trying to lead the children of Israel to the promised land of maturity. "If only we had died in Egypt where we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread" they protested, "For you have brought us out into this wilderness to die of hunger." When they came under pressure as adults, they hankered after the certainties of childhood. "We may well have been slaves in Egypt, but at least we had our fill to eat" they screamed. We all have to make a similar journey, and we are all destined to confront the same primitive instincts manifested by the Israelites. Anyone who strives to shed the infantile God of childhood with find the same protests welling up within themselves. But to retain the God of childhood is to opt for slavery and to spurn the liberty offered by God's joyous spirit. "Rejoice int he Lord always" the antiphon of today's Mass urges us, "again I say, rejoice!" The Lord expects an optimistic, positive disposition from his people, not a foolish gormless optimism that would ignore reality, but an optimism based on the confident belief that Jesus has risen and lives forever with his people.

This lightheartedness and optimism has largely passed us by. Religion is a serious business. We must, by hook or by crook, save our souls. We forget the fact that Jesus has already saved us, that our efforts to save ourselves are misplaced.

About ten years ago, every Augustinian priest in Ireland was called back to Dublin for a month's renewal. We were all put through exercises with a distinctly American flavour. One of these exercises involved trust: if you were in real trouble, who would you trust most. We were sent into groups of five, and we were asked to devise our own imaginative tests. I found myself in a group with four more senior men. The test devised was as follows: If you were hanging by a rope over the Cliffs of Moher, who would you trust to hold the rope above. Three of them opted for one man. Mind you, they all did agree that he was not a fellow you would go out for a night of fun with. Nevertheless, he was renowned for being pious and very religious. He obeyed every rule in the book through his long religious life. Three of the group said that they would trust this man with their lives. The fourth one, a class mate of the man in question, dissented. He said he had grave reservations. "Look", he said, "Mike has no humour in him. If the Angelus rang, he would bless himself, and to hell with the rope and myself" Religious duties would win out over the claims of humanity.

Even the tragic can be lightened by the touch of the humourist. On a winter's day in the late 1970's I attended a funeral in Drogheda with Padraig Daly whose poetry I have already quoted. The deceased had many clerical connections, so there was a heavy clerical presence at the burial. When the burial ceremony ended, a Christian Brother, who had been standing at the edge of the crowd, pushed his way through to sympathise with the grieving widow. But the brother didn't bargain for the artificial nature of the grass mat that covered the grave as a temporary measure. With his consoling hand outstretched towards the widow, he stepped disastrously on the mat and disappeared. Daly and myself retired to the White Horse Inn to regain our composure. Years later, he wrote a poem that found echoes with me. He had changed the names, the location, but the circumstances were unmistakable:

Today in Mount Jerome

Hurrying to offer the widow sympathy
And hoping to escape quickly from the ice on the wind,
Today in Mount Jerome a small fat nun
Stepped on the artificial grass over a gravemouth
And fell heavily down the opening.

Nothing was heard but the sacrilegious thud
As Sister Dympna Mary, guimp and wimple, disappeared,
Flowers cascading down about her:
(Even the widow, weeping her guilt away,
Was moved to silence).

Fortunately the coffin broke her fall
(The grave being shallow
Due to the recent interment of the corpse's mother);
She was standing up like Lazarus newly risen
Before the mourners registered her plight's enormity.

Eventually two men stepped down into the grave
And handed her up, the crowd gathering solicitously to watch:
A man came forward with a heavy overcoat,
A nurse examined her for sprains and breakages,
Some pious ladies dusted the clay away.

Noting the widow's accumulating wrath
And fearing heavy casualties if war broke out,
A friend at last hustled Sister off:
They stopped for nourishment at Blade's of Terenure,
The skies heavy with threat of snow.

The 17th century English poet, John Donne (He of the 'No man is an island' fame) once described humour as 'one of the many sparks that flew from the mind of God on the first day of Creation.' Through celebrating Gaudete Sunday, the Church endeavours to recapture 'one of the many divine sparks that flew from the mind of God.' For sparks such as these will prepare us for that 'Light that was coming into the world.'