"Joy to the world"

"from its very beginning Christianity has been the proclamation of joy, of the only possible joy on earth.  It rendered impossible all joy we usually think of as possible.  But within this possibility, at the very bottom of this darkness, it announced and conveyed a new all-embracing joy, and with this joy it transformed the End into a Beginning.  Without the proclamation of this joy Christianity is incomprehensible.  It is only as joy that the Church was victorious in the world, and it lost the world when it lost that joy, and ceased to be a credible witness to it.  Of all accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche when he said that Christians had no joy."

     Alexander Schmemann, For the life of the world:  sacraments and Orthodoxy, 2nd rev. & expanded ed. (New York:  St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1973), 24.  I was reminded of this passage by Fr. Khaled Anatolios, whose 7 September 2019 Thomistic Institute lecture "Salvation:  a view from the Byzantine liturgy," which speaks of (among other things) "doxological contrition", is a helpful attempt to take up the senses in which joy must of course be a Christian experience (summarized from 39:45, or, more specifically, 40:50).