A Few Thoughts on “Joy”, Provoked by C.S. Lewis, in the Third Week of Advent

Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else—whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods of Asgard—does the “thrill” arise (C.S. Lewis).

The third Sunday of Advent is known as “Gaudete Sunday” on account of the Introit of the Mass: Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete ("Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice!”). This Latin word gaudium—joy, delight, gladness—is placed in the verbal plural imperative form: we, as a community, are enjoined, commanded, even, to be joyful. 

Perhaps on its face this seems absurd, impossible. I can’t simply be joyful when I wish to be, can I? Rather I’m either joyful or not at a given moment and that’s just that. Joy is an emotion, isn’t it? And emotions come and go unbidden by my will and desire.

Perhaps. And then again, perhaps not. It is so that we should never try to “work-up” Joy for if we did we would certainly fail to experience it in any case. We ought to begin by saying that any meaningful understanding of Joy begins with affirming its non-identity with anything like “sense of well-being” or “contentment”, and certainly not with “satisfaction” or mere “pleasure” or anything of the sort. I don’t intend to do a full exegetical-theological exposition of Christian Joy, but only to point out something fundamental about it. Christian Joy is related to something in human experience (I would like to say in universal human experience although one wonders these days if the pre-condition of Joy—contemplation of a worthy object—exists for many in our age of narcotic distraction). C.S. Lewis can help us to reflect upon the question, though.

“At that very moment there arose the memory of a place and time at which I had tasted the lost Joy with unusual fullness. It had been a particular hill walk on a morning of white mist. The other volumes of the Ring (The Rheingold and The Valkyrie) had just arrived as a Christmas present from my father, and the thought of all the reading before me, mixed with the coldness and the loneliness of the hillside, the drops of moisture on every branch, and the distant murmur of the concealed town, had produced a longing (yet it was also fruition) which had flowed over my mind and seemed to involve the whole body. The walk I now remembered. I seemed to have tasted heaven then. If only such a moment could return!” (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 1955).

The “thrill”, the felt experience of Joy, came to Lewis first of all not when he was trying to “get it” but rather in the moment of pure enjoyment, when his mind was fixed on the object—the wood, the mist, the hidden town over the crest of the hill, the thought of the books he would read. The mind and heart are made for such contemplation of desirable objects, and the Beautiful, the Sublime, the True and the Good come to meet us in contemplation and when they do, we may find ourselves shuddering and trembling, even weeping in their presence as if the god has passed by in the hallway outside of the cracked open door. For indeed, He has. But it is not, however, the trembling tears of Joy that we seek. They are only the signs of the momentary pressing-in of the divinity, and it is Him we desire. We must know this or all is in vain.

To possess the longing that is Joy, we must contemplate Joy’s Object where it can be found. Superficial narcotics of whatever kind will never do, for they produce only feeling with no content—all “outside” but no “inside”, or rather perhaps the opposite: all emotion, but emotion about nothing. Seeking mere narcotic experiences are, as Lewis says, looking “for the dead among the living”, for divinity is all around us if we but learn how to place ourselves in His way. 

I recall my own journey of childhood memory that was sparked by this passage in Lewis the first time I read it over twenty years ago, his recounting of the moment of Joy. It was indeed Christmastime in a northeastern city where my family lived. My father had taken us children to a “Christmas Town” exhibit at a local community center, a grand old 19th century mansion with rooms upon rooms across three marvelous stories. Each room was its own city of delight—lights and toys and decorations and music and fine, Edwardian furniture the likes of which I had never seen, and in one particularly grand room, a tiny model train set passing through a massive and meticulously crafted miniature period town honed in detail and hand-painted, a way of life long past yet brought to the present by the Spirit of Christmas. What delight! And then I thought of the Christmas Eve candlelight service in the Methodist church of the little upstate New York village where we later lived, a candlelight vigil where my school friends and their families gathered, on that night unashamed of admitting a penchant for religion otherwise ignored through the rest of the year. Or certain pieces of music, particular passages even, that upon my hearing them would place me instantly in tears (not of sadness, even if the tune was sad-like, but of something else). How the world in those moments seemed changed, as if transfigured to allow the Animating Spirit to shine through, the divinity pressing in His face just a bit closer, just for an instant, as if He knew it were all I could bear.

Lewis goes on to explain.

“But what I never realized was that it had returned—that the memory of the walk was itself a new experience of the same kind. True, it was desire, not possession. But then what I had felt on that walk had also been desire, and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is itself desirable, is the fullest possession we can know on earth, or rather, because the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, was itself such a stabbing. The Desirable which had once alighted on Valhalla was now alighting on a particular moment of my own past; and I would not recognize him there because, being an idolator and a formalist, I insisted that he ought to appear in the temple I had built for him; not knowing that he cares only for temples building and not for temples built.”

And so it is with us. We waste time and precious life chasing feelings and emotions, “states” of ourselves, as if they by themselves are the Reality we seek. They are not. Our vain attempt to command the appearance of Joy can even be taken on as a religious, even a Christian, project whereby we seek “charismatic experiences” as proof of God’s existence and love for us, as signs of divine communion. Our life in this world is not for such things. Our life in this world is rather the walking upon a road, a road which is leading us onward to a place outside of ourselves, both where we have never been but yet can remember. As Lewis makes Joy to say: “I am only a reminder. Look! What do I remind you of? You want—I myself am your want of—something other, outside, not you or any state of you.”

And now then, we’re back to this command of St. Paul (Philippians 4:4) to Rejoice—Gaudete! Christian Joy is only for the Christian in the moment of his being precisely a Christian, in is moment of fixing himself, not on an emotion, but on an object, the Object Itself which is the Person Himself. In the attentive reading of Sacred Scripture. In the worship of the Holy Mass. In the silent moments of personal prayer where I open my heart and mind in honest supplication—Lord, give me Yourself—in self-forgetful service to another.

The God who reveals Himself to us is the One we desire for His Own sake, the Utmost. But in this world we are still on the road. We have not yet arrived. And so our possession of God, our communion with Him, is in our desiring Him. His gift to us of Himself in this world is the gift of desiring Him. This desire for God, however, cannot be manufactured by any technique or craft of our making. It is achieved in us by our being patient upon Him, our waiting upon Him. We must learn to contemplate the “one whom our soul loves” without asking for anything more than the contemplation. As we learn to achieve this, we will find Joy.

Fr. Byron S. Hagan is the Parochial Vicar of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Northeast Minneapolis.