Tragedy or Comedy?

“You must have mirth, or you will have madness.”

We’ve all heard of the Seven Deadly Sins, but the original list had eight.

In the fourth century, the monk Evagrius identified the specific temptations that derail the spiritual life. When Gregory the Great later streamlined the catalog, he folded the sin of sadness into the sin of sloth. The edit made for a tidier list, but something was lost in the consolidation.

For the desert fathers, sadness wasn’t just a bad mood. It was a form of spiritual dejection—a heaviness that dulled the heart and made God’s grace feel distant.

Yet Evagrius and the desert fathers didn’t only warn against these dark moods—they also championed their antidote. They spoke of hilaritas, a holy cheerfulness, as essential to the spiritual life.

This wasn’t frivolity or denial. It was a lightness of spirit that refused to let sorrow have the final word.

St. Teresa of Avila knew of this hilaritas, famously praying to be spared from “gloomy saints.”

G.K. Chesterton agreed, observing that “angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”

This is the invitation: not to ignore our burdens, but to loosen our grip on our own seriousness. We let joy—real, grounded, stubborn joy—have a say in our storytelling.

We allow that holy lightness to lift our hearts, and we find that we, too, were built to fly.