“Joy” is a bright, simple word. It tugs on the heart.
The mere mention of joy reminds us of a deep lack in our lives. We live without joy more often than we’d like to admit.
So I don’t have anything against the political planner who came up with the notion of employing “joy” as a vote-ginning theme. Who wouldn’t want a little more joy in the country? When joy shows up, you don’t reject it. Nobody does.
But I hope I can be forgiven when I suggest that joy isn’t something politics can provide.
Joy is never in our power.
The emphasis is mine; the thought is all C.S. Lewis, who titled the memoir of his early years Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life, a book that deeply reflects on the mystery of this wonderful gift.
Lewis discloses that he first recognized joy’s elusive surge when the “memory of a memory” arose in his mind as he stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day. A moment of childhood innocence returned to his mind, the memory of a “toy garden” his older brother had just brought into the nursery:
It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?…Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse…withdrawn, the world turn commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased…I call it Joy.
Lewis describes joy as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” He doubted that anyone who ever tasted joy would trade it for all the pleasures of the world.
Surprised by Joy was published in 1954, in the middle of a century that had survived two world wars. Lewis fought in the first one; he was a committed atheist who had gradually come to belief in Christ while “kicking and screaming” against a faith he did not want to claim. Joy was one of the hints along the way that there is much more to the world than the mere materialism of modernity.
One might say that joy’s winks and whispers opened his heart to the possibility of a more expansive world view. He would call himself the “most reluctant convert” in all of England.
Our century is even more closed than Lewis’ was to the idea of faith, but it has its converts too. When the poet and memoirist Christian Wiman (who found faith after years as an “ambivalent atheist”) began proposing the project of a joy-themed poetry anthology, the idea “provoked some controversy.”
Wiman suggests the word itself may need a little healing.
The dictionary may be of some use as a starting point for defining joy, Wiman writes in his introduction to joy: 100 poems,
But if you are trying to understand why the moment of joy can blast you right out of the life to which it makes you all the more lovingly and tenaciously attached, or why this lift into pure bliss might also entail a steep drop of concomitant loss, or how, in the midst of great grief so fugitive and inexplicable, joy might, like one tiny flower in a land of ash bloom–well, in these cases the dictionary is useless.
And then he quotes a poem as an alternative: Norman MacCaig’s “One of the Many Days,” which offers these luminous lines:
The river ran glass in the sun.
I waded in the jocular water
…I watched
A whole long day
Release its miracles.
Joy, in an unexpected flash.
One morning last summer I was checking my X (formerly Twitter) feed, the last place anyone would look for joy, which of course, I wasn’t.
A link from Wiseblood Books caught my eye, and since I love Wiseblood’s mission, I clicked.
For one minute and three seconds, I sat at my computer listening to a poem from a newly released collection, Painting Over the Growth Chart.
Dan Rattelle. “American Robin.”
The poet had just seen the first robin of the spring. He speaks to a distant friend, Sam, who had once explained to him that our robin is distinct from the proper one, “no bigger than a golf-ball.” The American robin is actually a thrush, “a family of songsters second only to the nightingale.”
I smiled in wordy kinship with Sam, as I too, love to expound on fragments of knowledge from the world of ornithological wonder.
“You might know,” the poet admits:
“I don’t. But, under a streetlamp
on a rainy Tuesday before work,
before daylight, in time
that’s free and unaccounted for, I think I hear it.
The sweet memory of robin song, of streetlamps and rainy Tuesday mornings was suddenly mine. More than that, a bittersweet longing for just one more moment of “time that’s free and unaccounted for.”
A stab of joy right there at my computer.
Had I been seeking joy, it would have eluded me. But Rattelle’s poem somehow catalyzed my thirst, the “desirable unsatisfied desire” in my heart.
Lewis sees in that desire a glimmer of God.
“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy,” the reluctant convert reasons in Mere Christianity, “the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Another world, the transcendent one.
Sure, we’re obligated, during our time in this world, to support programs and policies we hope will honor human dignity and increase the common good. Whether we “enjoy” it or not, we must pay attention, do our duty as faithful citizens, and vote.
But jamming joy into the political conversation reminds me of the lemon scented dishwashing soap at my mother’s kitchen sink, the one with JOY spelled out in a pop of color on the label. Sniffing the contents provides a pleasant whiff, but joy is not what’s inside.
“Go with your love to the fields,” Wendell Berry exhorts in “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” another poem in Wiman’s anthology, “Lie easy in the shade…
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go….
Practice resurrection.
Because joy cannot be ginned.
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You might also enjoy Can Birds Rehumanize Red and Blue Politics? and Loving Your Neighbor while Reading the Times: A Theological Contemplation of the News.
Poet Christian Wiman recovered Christian faith in the midst of living with a diagnosis of cancer. He tells the story and discusses his book Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair in a remarkable conversation hosted by The Trinity Forum.
Images by noahherrera and stanbalik from Pixabay.
