Surprised by Joy

It seems that more and more people today are longing for meaning, for an answer, for something greater than themselves and their stressful lives. Feeling this longing as a vague uneasiness, some people may brush it aside, buy more things, drink too much, or otherwise attempt to distract themselves. Others, who are more aware that the unease is spiritual, may find a church or explore yoga, energy healing, meditation or collective consciousness.

I've been revisiting some of the books that were especially important to me years ago as pointers toward the meaning of my own unease and longing. I've also recently been reading with great interest several newish books on contemporary religious philosophy.

For example, world religions expert Huston Smith has noted in his book Why Religion Matters (published in 2001 by HarperCollins) that "whether we realize it or not, simply to be human is to long for release from mundane existence, with its confining walls of finitude and mortality."

Author C.S. Lewis called this longing "Joy." (He lived from 1898 to 1963, and was the author of the Narnia series for young people and adult Christian works such as The Screwtape Letters.) Lewis writes in the preface to his partial autobiography, Surprised by Joy (published by Harvest Books in 1955), "I have been emboldened to write of it [Joy] because I notice that a man seldom mentions what he had supposed to be his most idiosyncratic sensations without receiving from at least one (often more) of those present the reply, 'What! Have you felt that too? I always thought I was the only one!'" Yes! Sound familiar?

Lewis states that Joy was an experience of "intense desire," triggered several times when he was a boy, and he "desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described." He also called the experience "something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, 'in another dimension.'"

Lewis again experienced Joy as an adult, when he was being drawn inexorably from atheism to theism to Christianity. At that point, he realized that Joy itself was not what was longed for (though he notes that the experience is so intense that one searches for ways to repeat it again and again), but rather was a pointer to Something much greater, a reminder of the Divine.

I was fascinated by Lewis' book when I read it in college, for his descriptions of Joy perfectly matched experiences of my own which also had begun in childhood.

I had enrolled in 1972 at Lone Mountain College in San Francisco. Though it was nominally a Catholic school (we were "Les enfants du Sacre Couer"), many of Lone Mountain's courses bore a definite "New Age" flavor.

All students at Lone Mountain were required to take at least one religious studies course in order to graduate. But this class was not at all what I expected. We were allowed to pretty much create our own syllabus, and with some guidance from the teacher, I launched into an ambitious study of Paul Tillich, Pierre Theilard de Chardin, Martin Buber, and others. (My final paper in the course was a comparison of the thought of Theilard de Chardin with the ideas of Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy.)

Probably most important, I encountered Surprised by Joy. I identified immediately and with considerable excitement with Lewis' descriptions of Joy, and also with his turning from atheism to Christianity. As the Lone Mountain course progressed, I began to think more and more, "You know, maybe there's something here for me after all."

This was the beginning for me of feeling "led," a leading which 2 years later was to bring me to the doors of an interdenominational Protestant seminary, and to another Door beyond that. But that's a story for future posts (it's rather a long one).