Not God's Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms by Holly Ordway

Author:Holly Ordway
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586179991
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2014-10-07T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

LIGHT FROM THE INVISIBLE LAMP

The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

April in coastal San Diego. The winter rain had ended; the weather was warming up; flowers burst forth in mad profusion. With May and June would come the seasonal cloud cover known to locals as ‘May gray’ and ‘June gloom’, setting the stage for the hot sun of July, but before then came bright, brilliant April. A few days before Easter, I was riding my bicycle home from work, pedaling slowly, thinking once again about the questions that were occupying me. God existed; what did that mean for me?

My route took me along the coast. The ocean lay to my right, an expanse of blue dotted with surfers bobbing in the swells; gulls careened overhead; an arrow-formation of pelicans glided majestically north.

Suddenly, and with a shock of recognition, I realized that at a level deeper than I’d realized, I loved being alive. To be sure, often I felt fractured, pulled in different directions, at odds with myself. . . but sometimes, I would feel a moment of glorious wholeness, a delight in simply being ‘me’ in a way that included my mind, emotions, body. Being outside on a crisp spring day: feeling sunlight on my face, hearing the crash and roar of waves, letting the breeze ruffle through my hair. Enjoying a good cup of coffee in the morning: the aroma as it brewed, the taste of the coffee, the warmth of the mug as I wrapped my hands around it. Most of all, fencing: not just the thrill of competition or the satisfaction of victory, but the wordless celebration of movement, the joy of being ‘in the moment’ with my body and my mind united in willed action.

Months later, reading Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, I found the right words for what I had felt. Though Lewis and I each encountered this inarticulable joy for the first time in very different contexts—Lewis in reading stories, I in athletics—Lewis describes the shared experience with precision:

[This experience of joy] is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. . . . considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

The world was often painful to live in and difficult to understand, but every so often I got a glimpse of beauty at its core.

As I rolled to a stop at the intersection

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