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In preparation for our series on thankfulness, Kalie provides an excellent overview of the book, Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis.

What is joy? Some would describe it as a feeling, a mindset, or a state of being. Maybe it is a choice, a gift, or a goal. For C.S. Lewis, it was much more, and also much less. Surprised by Joy, written in Lewis’s usual compelling, comical prose, chronicles the role Joy played in leading him to Christianity.

Throughout childhood, Lewis’s leisure was primarily spent in the world of imagination. He devoured books that depicted the fantastic and wrote stories about a fantasy world of his own creation. Sometimes, while reading a story or poem, or catching a glimpse of nature, he experienced Joy, “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” This desire for something “other and outer” corresponded with his fascination in the mythical realm.

As he moved from one boarding school to the next, the Christian faith of his childhood suffered a series of changes. First, he determined to pray each night until he achieved a feeling of reverie. Naturally this was abandoned as the experiential, works-based approach led to defeat and disillusionment. Next, a teacher interested in the occult led him, unwittingly, to abandon his belief in God altogether. Even as he entered higher education as an Atheist, he still felt pangs of Joy and a bond with mythology.

As a scholar at Oxford and an officer in WWI, Lewis found himself inexorably drawn to Christian writers and thinkers. Unable to live consistently with atheism, he slowly recognized that the narratives of myth and the glimpses of Joy, which he’d been calling “aesthetic experience,” pointed to an impersonal Absolute.

Lewis likens God’s pursuit and his resistance to a game of chess. The struggle was mainly against “my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness.” He feared, most of all, that God would interfere with his life. He tried desperately to cling to his materialistic belief that the world, including humans, was just a “meaning dance of atoms.”

But Joy was not done with him. His short-lived encounters with Joy continued to remind him of another world, and the Absolute in which he now believed. Slowly, as he read and conversed about Christianity, Lewis fully abandoned modernism and finally saw that his attempts to capture and dissect Joy were futile. ”Joy,” he writes, “considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring.” Joy led him to recognize his desire for God and finally his need for Christ.

Perhaps the greatest surprise is that a perfect God longs for a relationship with depraved humanity, and that He pursues us despite our best efforts to ignore Him. God gives glimpses of Himself—in nature, in humanity, in story and history—but “all images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate,” as Lewis said. Joy is meant to lead to and come from God, but we often confuse it with an independently attained feeling.

All mankind is searching for Joy, though we may call it happiness or comfort or the American dream. But we cannot know Joy until we know God personally. Then, His amazing grace and unthinkable love replace our selfish longing for Joy with a desire for Him.

We experience Joy because “we yearn, rightly, for that unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal beings called ‘we.’” We are made to be in relationship with God, but must submit to Him in order to experience real Life and Love. Lewis insightfully points out that “the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.” We will always have, and should always want, the true love God gives us. All we need do is ask. This is the surprise of Joy.

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