Compiling just seven essentials from philosopher Peter Kreeft’s new book, The Mystery of Joy (Ignatius), might seem a daunting exercise in distillation and parsing.

But any effort to foster a better appreciation of divine joy, as put forth by a highly esteemed Catholic apologist, is certainly worth the effort.

A professor of philosophy at Boston College, Peter Kreeft is one of the most influential Catholic authors of our time. With more than 100 books to his credit, Kreeft’s work serves as a significant counterweight to the secular materialism and nihilist atmosphere that pervades so much of today’s academia and social and political discourse.

The Mystery of Joy consists primarily of 95 sections – or pensées – describing the many attitudes one might adopt to embrace and fully recognize the benefits of Christian joy.

As Kreeft explains, joy for the Christian believer is much more than contentment, happiness or the absence of pain and suffering. Joy in the Christian sense is not just a feeling or a good mood. The “mystery” in the book’s title is well chosen. For all its ubiquitousness in our language, the word “joy,” for Kreeft, is still encased in mystery and elusiveness.

As the author asks early in his work, “Do you want to know and live in truth and reality, even if it entails feelings of sorrow and suffering, or do you want good feelings at the expense of truth and reality? You may think that’s a hard question to answer, but it isn’t. What it really means is, Do you want to live in the world God willed for you or the one you desire for yourself?”

While the following selections are arbitrary and subjective, rest assured they have been carefully culled from the master’s voice.

1. Unlike happiness, joy never gets boring because it is always a surprise. It is not mere contentment or satisfaction of our desires. It is not planned. It is a gift, a grace.

2. Our joy includes a cross. Christ asks us to share his cross with him, like Simon of Cyrene — actually to share his act of carrying it. This is not mere imitation but a real participation in his act. The joy Christ had in his terrible passion was the certain and infallible knowledge that his deeds were saving those he loved from hell and opening to them the joys of heaven.

3. The essence of joy is “Thy will be done,” not “My will be done.” The power that makes joy, as bees make honey, is not the feelings but the will. Heaven is where God’s will is done. There are two places that fit that description: the place where God and the blessed live eternally after death, and the lives of God’s children here on earth.

4. When love fails, joy fails, for there is always some joy in love, however great the difficulties and sufferings. Joyless Christians make no converts. Joyful ones do. The hard-nosed, practical Romans were much more impressed by the joy they saw in Christians than by their ideas and ideals and beliefs, which often seemed to make no sense to the Romans. But they saw that Christians were the only ones who risked their lives to minister to plague victims and smiled as they did it. They forgave their enemies and sang hymns as they were eaten by lions.

5. Since our temporary, particular sorrows are surrounded by and defined by a greater joy, that means joy, not sorrow, is the great mystery. We understand what sorrow is, but we do not understand what joy is. The greater the sorrow, the clearer is the cause; the greater the joy, the more mysterious is the cause. Pessimism and nihilism are the opposite philosophy, the normalization of sorrow and the reduction of joy to an accident.

6. The Church is growing powerfully in Africa, in China and even in Muslim countries because it has joy amid its persecutions, poverty and political pressures. We in the West have far more freedoms and security, yet we have far fewer conversions, fewer saints, fewer martyrs and fewer miracles. All four of these come not from us but from God; that is why they come not only with supernatural power but also with supernatural joy.

7. All joy is an appetizer of heaven. (And all misery and despair are a warning that there is also a hell.) Joy is God’s gift; in fact, it is the gift of himself. We seek joy because we were designed for joy and created by divine joy, despite having fallen from our original nature and relationship to God. We are not in our natural, rightful condition, and neither is our world. There is no joy without charity (agape, self-giving love). Joy is the fulfillment of the self, and this comes only by what is apparently its opposite: the loss of self, voluntarily giving oneself away to others, in imitation of Christ.

Michael Mastromatteo is a writer, editor and book reviewer from Toronto.