I remember just three years ago laying in my room, listening to Brand New's album "Deja Entendu" with the lights out, singing along and dwelling in my existence but dwelling in wanting to escape. I escaped through my music. I was able to endure and enjoy in the midst of the suffering, the loneliness, and the faults of my own hands. I was able to somehow embrace my own artificial paradise. I became just like the Dadaists, in their attempt to escape this world through art. I was able to know that somehow I wasn't alone, because the words of the song in my ear where speaking of what was dwelling inside of me.
I look back, and I am not shamed; but I look at it and I can see how my desire to dwell in another paradise is just my need to be in the presence of God. As I was reading C.S. Lewis's book, I found I could relate with Lewis as he speaks of his love for writings, his love for the imaginary and then later in his story, his love for nature and the escape into reading. In the end, he attributes all of this, the desire to enjoy, to one source: Joy. Yet, this is not just any type of joy; not a joy that people can create, but it is the source of all that is enjoyable. Lewis brings in an example, "I read in Alexander's Space Time and Deity his theory of 'Enjoyment' and 'Contemplation.' These are the technical terms in Alexander's philosophy; 'Enjoyment' has nothing to do with pleasure, nor 'Contemplation' with the contemplative life" (217). He goes on to explain this and concludes that if we are in pleasure, it does not mean that we have found joy. For he says in example to hope, "You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope's object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at hope itself". He even explains that even though we can hope and have hope in that "they intercede" with each other, we also must understand that they are separate (218). This is really interesting. For me to find enjoyment in the things around me, this does not mean that I have found joy. There is a difference between finding pleasure and being led into joy (or even more accurately put: away from joy, as we are "looking back" not forward), than actually having Joy.
Therefore, what I want to speak about is how C.S. Lewis eventually "kicking and screaming" (229) finds that what he is in search for is an undeniable existent God, who is tasted through the enjoyment of this world, but is also separate from this world (an Enjoyment that is separate from pleasure). For he talks about how he always thought of joy as being something that was a place, something to be in the midst of; not that joy was an actual being: that which would be God. For he puts it in his own words saying, "I had hoped that the heart of reality might be of such a kind that we can best symbolize it as a place; instead, I found it to be a Person" (230).
What does it mean for joy to be a Person instead of just a place? I look back earlier in the book when Lewis is talking about how his enjoyments never satisfied,
"...my own experience had repeatedly shown that these romantic images had never been more than a sort of flash, or even slag, thrown off by the occurrence of Joy, that those mountains and gardens had never been what I wanted but only symbols which professed themselves to be no more, and that every effort to treat them as the real Desirable soon honestly proved itself to be a failure" (204).
Throughout the book he goes through the periods in his life when he gave himself up to enjoyment, and how he moved from on thing to another, in search of something. In the end he came to be convinced that he could not be satisfied. He says later on, "I perceived (and this was a wonder of wonders) that just as I had been wrong in supposing that I really desired the Garden of the Hesperides, so also I had been equally wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all." As he felt joy to be a pleasure constant in his mind, he found that this was unattainable and thought outside this world toward joy, "Inexorably joy proclaimed, 'You want-I myself am your want of-something other, outside, not you nor any state of you" (221). He finally came to conclude that this joy he was looking for was not of this world, because he had tried so many times to find it that he failed.
The example of playing with pleasure and not really finding joy is like deceiving yourself. Lewis says, "You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it" (177). For me this is good for me to read, because even though I enjoy to do graphic design, to play music, and be outside in nature, I need to make the distinction that pleasure can lead me away from God if I deceive myself of truth, or I can embrace truth by recognizing that Joy is not in the pleasure, but merely a reflection.
Still there is one thing that opened my eyes to the beauty of what Joy really is as I was reading this book. As I think of what joy really entails I think also of all the things that I have honestly lusted for: the desire for relationships, to find passion in art, to find passion in music, to intimately give of each other to care and love beyond caring of the consequences of foolish actions when giving one's self to artificial paradises, which include drugs and alcohol as well as art, music, and other things we escape reality with. I see that maybe the passion in all of these things, is perhaps not edify-able because we are not in the long run ending up in the destination. It may be, if I can be so bold to relate these things, that these pleasures and desires (reading, art, music, relationships, etc.) are a reflection, or a taste, of what Joy is and yet is not Joy and this is why it fails and even deceives us. And not to say that these things are beautiful to God (when we make idols for ourselves), but that this unified desire to want something to fill the need inside of us and to enjoy is a reflection of the lack of Joy in one's life. Do we, who are Christians, really find our enjoyment when we play with "idols", when we delve into pleasures and "artificial paradises"? I think not. And to think of Joy as a person, rather than a place, is to understand in a larger perspective. It then begs the question of me, "If I find pleasure in these small things, how much more enjoyable is actually having that Joy which is the source of it all?"
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