Reflections on Joy

While sitting out of doors, smoking a pipe

Detail from the month of April in Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (Public Domain)

It’s a beautiful day today. I’m sitting outside, smoking a pipe and have just finished working on my novel again (currently sitting at 37,040 words as of 4/14/24). When the weather is nice like this on the weekends, you can usually find me outside. I might be picking up dog poop from the yard, doing some work in the garden (my wife has got a wonderful array of seeds started for us which are all doing well), or sitting on our patio with a variety of books and notebooks out and my computer, hopefully being used to do some writing.

I’m not necessarily what you’d call an outdoorsy person. Don’t get me wrong, I did my fair share of camping and fishing and hiking, especially when I was in Boy Scouts. And I still enjoy a nice leisurely walk in the woods. But mostly I just like sitting outside and doing the things that bring me joy.

But what is joy? Do I just mean that I find pleasure in these activities? That’s certainly the case, at least most of the time. But I think joy is something more than that. C.S. Lewis talks about it as the thing that led him to God. He would catch glimpses of it and try to chase those glimpses. Eventually, after coming to faith, he realized that those moments of true joy were fleeting and not to be chased, but rather relished in when they come. It’s a bit like having a mystical experience. If you are blessed to have one, wonderful, but don’t go chasing it. Joy isn’t a genii who can be summoned by saying the right words in the right way. Nor is it a fairy who, if caught, must give you what wish. It’s more like an angel who deigns to make you aware of its presence or doesn’t. When it does, and if it isn’t terrifying, you can delight in it. But otherwise you must just keep living and sometimes it will come and sometimes it won’t. And we have to be okay with that.

I’m currently reading Leisure the Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper for a book club I’m leading. In that essay, he compares leisure to prayer. Leisure might, in fact it often does, make us refreshed and allows us to do our work better after we’ve been leisurely. Similarly, as he says, a man who says his nightly prayers may sleep better because he said them. But the man who prays in order to sleep better isn’t praying. Similarly, the man who is leisurely in order to be refreshed for the next day’s work is being leisurely. The man engaged in these activities is confusing effects with purpose. He is making the effects of leisure or prayer into the purpose for leisure or prayer. Joy, I think, works similarly. Writing will often bring joy, but if I do it only because sometimes I feel joyful, I’m writing for the wrong reasons. Often, things like reading or writing just bring some respite from the other parts of my day without bringing me into true joy. I might be happy and relaxed, but I have not entered into true joy.

Joy, rather, is both a disposition, a lens through which we view the world without reference to our feelings and it is a fruit of the Spirit. Since the Spirit acts on us all, Christian and non-Christian alike, we can all experience the fruits of the Spirit, though the Christian will experience them more fully. But even then, it is an effect of being filled with the Spirit, but the purpose for my being filled with him. The moments of joy I get to experience in this life are a foretaste of the Joy in which I will live when Christ returns and makes all things new. I can’t chase it anymore than I can be leisurely in order to work or pray in order to sleep well. All of these things, leisure, prayer, and joy are not done or experienced for some effect they sometimes have. Rather, we pursue or engage them because they are good in and of themselves. If I chase joy as the young C.S. Lewis did, I will always be disappointed and may give up many good things because they do not elicit in me the same feelings they did that time they gave me a stab of true joy.

Similarly, I cannot look at the world when I am melancholic and say it is thus devoid of joy. The presence of joy in this world is not dependent on my feelings. It is always here, whether I can experience it or not. And this is true of all the spiritual realities. Angels surround me at all times, ministering to me and to the rest of creation. Christ makes his home in my heart, even when I try to force him out. None of this is dependent on me. Rather, these things are facts of reality, knit into the very fabric of the cosmos. My job, as it were, is to be attentive and to keep doing the things that must be done for some end they affect alongside the things that are good to do for their own sake.

Often, I fail at this kind of attention. Work, a family, even friends can often require my focus be on the mundane. But there must also be time set aside for remembering the deeper realities even if they don’t always lead you to some new insight, some new virtue, some new spiritual experience. But I want to be attentive to them. Spending time outside, writing, reading, smoking a pipe, going on a walk, sometimes these things reveal that deeper reality to me, but so do times of suffering and sadness. Rather than chase the feeling, I want to chase the Good. That is a chase which will result in finding what you seek so long as you remain faithful to the chase, even when, perhaps especially when, it doesn’t feel like it.

Perhaps it is bit like setting out on a long journey where you know the destination, but not exactly the way to reach it. Various stops you make along the journey will give you a clue to what the destination is really like, but if you stay you’ll lose both the clue and the destination. Rather you must enjoy the inns you meet along the way but keep walking when the pause is over whether the sun is shining or rain and hail and pelting down on you. For if you persist, then the One who sent you on the journey will ensure you arrive. And if you do so frozen to the bone, dog tired, with blisters on your feet, he’ll put the kettle on, find you a warm spot to sit, tend your wounds and heal you’re every harm so well that you’ll feel better than you did even in the nicest town along the way. So walk on, look for joy where she might appear, but don’t chase her. Keep to the path and you’ll be brought to the place made to be your home.