Signals of Transcendence: Listening to the Promptings of Life by Os Guinness

Author:Os Guinness
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Meaning of life;purpose in life;following gods leading in life;looking for the signs;cs lewis;leo Tolstoy;finding direction in life;disillusioned;searching for meaning;the great quest
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2022-11-16T09:24:49+00:00

MORE TO LIFE THAN MEETS

THE MATERIALIST’S EYE

How did joy subvert Lewis’s atheism? Years before he met his wife, also named Joy, the idea of joy was so important to Lewis that he called it Joy, with a capital J. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis wrote of Joy that in a sense “the central story of my life is about nothing else.” At its heart, his life was about longing—“an inconsolable longing”—for something beyond human experience. Such longing was “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Joy, as he used the word, was sharply distinguished from both pleasure and happiness. Pleasure depends on the five senses—the sight of a beautiful landscape, the taste of a vintage wine, or the smell of an exquisite perfume—and happiness is a matter of circumstances, faring well, and feeling well. Joy, however, transcends both pleasure and happiness. Nietzsche was right: joy wills eternity. Or as Lewis described it, “I doubt whether anyone who has ever tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.”

Lewis’s idea of Joy included beauty, music, poetry, myth, human love, and nature. He tasted Joy as he walked the Mourne Mountains near his home in Northern Ireland, he heard it in the Ring Cycle of Richard Wagner, and he encountered it again and again as he read authors such as Spenser, Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Morris, and George MacDonald. One famous moment when Lewis tasted Joy occurred on a summer day when he stood beside a flowering currant bush. Suddenly and without warning the memory rose in him of a time in his old family home in Belfast when his older brother, Warnie, brought his toy garden into the nursery. He was overwhelmed by a sensation of blissful joy. “It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? Not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past—and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.”

Desire, longing, memory, sensation, a “whiff” of something, “homesickness” for somewhere, “mysterious leaks” of “Something Else” into experience, a world beyond the border of the world, a “Nameless Isle”—Lewis’s descriptions of being surprised by Joy are hauntingly evocative. But he always wanted to be precise. The promptings were not nostalgia, a yearning for the past. Nor did they stop and rest on any earthly object. They reach forward and higher and always out of reach—“they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” Joy was active, and not passive.

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