DRUNK ON GOD.

The Holy Spirit & Contagious Joy

Somewhere along the way, Catholics began to mistake being pissed off all the time for spiritual zeal.

We began to treat joy like a shallow thing. Like joy only belongs to the naive, the unserious, the people who simply haven’t seen how bad “everything really is” yet.

But this is strange, because one of the first things the Holy Spirit does in Scripture is make a woman sing with joy.

When the angel Gabriel comes to Mary, she is greatly troubled. She questions him, but she consents. The Holy Spirit overshadows her, and the Word becomes flesh in her womb.

And then…. she sings.

We call this the “Magnificat” but I prefer the more ancient name, the Canticle of Mary or the Song of Mary.

She sings gleefully, “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior!”

Why do we glance over such a detail? Do you not see it?

This is what happens when the Holy Spirit fills a human soul. The first sign isn’t always certainty or a perfectly sharpened argument.

Sometimes the first sign of the Holy Spirit is joy rising from the depths before the mind has finished understanding what God has done.

And because this joy is from God, it does not stay trapped inside of Our Lady.

Mary goes in haste to the hill country, carrying Christ hidden beneath her heart, and the joy within her begins to move outward. It travels with her footsteps. It rides on her greeting. It enters the house of Zechariah before anyone has explained anything.

Elizabeth hears Mary’s voice, and something in her recognizes what Mary is carrying. And her own joy rises in answer: “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”

And then, even this joy does not stop with Elizabeth.

The Joy of God moves deeper still, into the hidden life within her, and John leaps in Elizabeth’s womb.

Joy begets joy.

Mary’s joy becomes Elizabeth’s joy.

Elizabeth’s joy becomes John’s joy.

The song of one woman becomes the cry of another, and the cry of one mother becomes the leap of an unborn prophet.

One hidden grace recognizes another hidden grace!

Joy calls to joy!

Womb answers womb!

The Christ hidden in Mary awakens the prophet hidden in Elizabeth!

This is the first little Pentecost. Before the upper room, before the tongues of fire, before the apostles spill into the street sounding drunk on God, there is Mary crossing the hill country with the Holy Spirit alive in her.

And notice what she does not do.

She does not weaponize her chosenness. She does not become severe. She does not mistake her anxiety or tension for a form of righteousness. She does not carry God into the world like a clenched fist.

No, she carries Him like a song.

And at Pentecost, the same joy breaks open again, only this time it is louder, stranger, and impossible to keep inside.

The apostles are gathered in the upper room, waiting and afraid, unsure of what comes next. They are not polished religious professionals preparing to launch a global movement. They are wounded men, frightened men, men who had locked the doors after the death of Christ because fear had settled deep within them. They have seen the risen Lord, yes, but they are still learning what it means to live as if death has actually been defeated.

Then the Holy Spirit comes.

Fire descends. The locked room bursts open, and the apostles pour into the street proclaiming the mighty works of God in languages they did not know. The crowd is bewildered, and some people assume they must be drunk.

Which is funny, yes, but it is also revealing.

The Holy Spirit does not make them grim. He makes them alive. He does not turn them into cold religious machines, or carefully managed representatives of a respectable new movement. He fills them with a courage so strange, so excessive, so unguarded, that drunkenness is the only category some people have for it.

This is what holy joy does. It makes people harder to control. It makes fear less convincing. It makes locked doors less final. It sends people into the street when they would rather stay hidden, and it gives them words when silence would feel much safer.

And He does not do this by making everyone angrier. He does not heal the nations by making everyone more suspicious, more severe, more addicted to baptizing the worst parts of their personalities and calling it discernment.

He does it through fire, breath, speech, courage, and joy.

The Holy Spirit is contagious joy.

Not fake happiness. Not toxic positivity or pretending the world is fine. Mary’s joy did not erase the sword that would pierce her heart, and the apostles’ joy did not spare them suffering, rejection, prison, or martyrdom. But it did make them free.

Free enough to sing before they understood everything, to leap before they were born, to speak when they were afraid.

That is the kind of joy the Church needs again. A joy that does not ignore sorrow, but refuses to let sorrow have the final word. A joy that does not look away from the darkness, but carries Christ into it. A joy that does not deny the fire because it has already been set on fire by God.

Because if the Holy Spirit is truly alive in us, something should move. Something should sing. Something should leap. Something should become less afraid.

And maybe, before the Church can speak clearly to the world again, she has to recover the strange, unsettling, contagious joy of Pentecost.

Mary sang. Elizabeth cried out. John leapt. The apostles looked drunk.

So, perhaps before we accuse the world of being too cold, we should ask whether we have let the fire in us go dim.

SING.

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