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Monday, October 16, 2006
The Open Secret of Joy
Philippians 4:4-9
The only way you'll find true happiness in this life is to give up looking for it. Just one more of God's greatest ironies. The Apostle Paul knew it, and so did C. S. Lewis.
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C. S. Lewis is probably best known lately as the author of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first of seven "Chronicles of Narnia" -- children's books about a magical kingdom ruled by the lion prince Aslan. The 2005 live-action film version of that story won critical acclaim and revived interest in all of Lewis's writings.
Good thing.
For this British scholar in English literature was one of the 20th century's most influential writers advocating for the Christian faith in a world gone thoroughly secular. Scores of his books, popular and technical, remain in print decades after their publication. Dozens of literary societies study them to this day. And children read and re-read the Narnia stories as if they came off the presses only yesterday.
In his mid-50s he wrote a memoir called Surprised By Joy. In its pages he narrated his journey from childhood in a formal Victorian moralistic world into adult life in a formally agnostic, post-World War I, world of academia.
Lewis remembered from earliest childhood a heartfelt longing for what he called Joy, a fulfillment that transcends mere happiness or pleasure. Those good feelings are dependent on circumstances, on what happens to you. Joy is a matter of the bones and marrow of your being, of your heart and your soul.
He told of flashes of insight, flushes of good feeling, that sometimes took his breath away. Of being drawn to the green hills visible from his boyhood home in Belfast. Of the innate kindness gladly given by his nursery maid. Of glints of sunlight, whiffs of a garden. On and on, as boy and man, he encountered hints of eternity flickering in the world of time and space.
He and his Oxford colleagues enjoyed debating and dickering about religious questions. It was all so stimulating and not the least bit threatening to penetrate their intellectual armor. And yet, Lewis and a few friends had to agree that apologists like G. K. Chesterton made a lot of practical and theoretical sense -- if only they weren't Christians!
In time, Lewis kind of argued himself into a theological corner, squirming to deflect the persuasive power of the Christian faith -- if only it weren't Christian! And finally, on a bus ride to the local zoo, he simply realized that he did believe the gospel. Outwardly undramatic, his conversion that day was, he said, that of an inwardly kicking and screaming penitent. If he'd been able to continue doubting he surely would have, but that was not to be.
When he became a Christian Lewis gave up his quest for Joy. He'd discovered he was known, loved, and engaged by the Maker and Ruler of the Universe. That was enough. So he thought.
And yet, as time passed, C. S. Lewis discovered that elusive Joy comes at last to stay in the midst of knowing, loving, and serving God. To any Christian, that is the great open secret of God's way with the world.
Paul the Apostle says it this way:
"Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I say, rejoice!" (Philippians 4:4) Then he says we should remember what we already know about God, what we've already received from God. "Think about these things," he says, and worry will vaporize, fear will disappear. In their place rise up joyous commitment to God's ways and courage to pursue them faithfully.
That's the way C. S. Lewis lived the last thirty or so years of his life. And he wrote about it every which way he could, trying to turn readers' hearts and minds toward the God he'd found, or been found by, in Jesus Christ.
Footnote: In God's delicious irony, the lifelong bachelor Lewis met, fell in love with, and married (not in that order) an American expatriate named Joy Davidman Gresham. In their few short years together, this mentally tough, compassionate, eccentric, devout woman surprised him again and again with her tenacious unconditional love. Their story is told with good humor and deep respect in the movie "Shadowlands" featuring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.
posted by Jack Buckley at
3:20 PM
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