The Return of Joy

"...the return of Joy had introduced into my life a duality which makes it difficult to narrate... I am telling a story of two lives. They had nothing to do with each other: oil and vinegar, a river running beside a canal, Jekyll and Hyde. Fix your eye on either and it claims to be the sole truth. When I remember my outer life I see clearly that the other is but momentary flashes, seconds of gold scattered in months of dross, each instantly swallowed up in the old, familiar, sordid, hopeless weariness. When I remember my inner life I see that everything... was merely a coarse curtain which at any moment might be drawn aside to reveal all the heavens I then knew."

- C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Unlike mere Happiness, true Joy comes into our lives as a mixed bag of paradoxes. We experience it in those heart wrenching moments where we let go of those whom we love most dearly precisely because we love them so much. We realise that our love has been tried and tested when we are able to hold those things which mean everything to us with an open palm, because to lose them, is to lose everything.

Joy, as meek and as unassuming as she may seem, really deals a mortal blow to that which we call Self - and so Joy has no more to do with Self than Passion can have anything more to do with Propriety. We desire Joy as we sit and behold a hauntingly beautiful sunset and wistfully wished that there was someone sitting beside us to share it with. Joy is only made full when we get to share it with someone else: when friends celebrate our birth-day and when our proud parents attend our graduation. A happily wedded two share their bliss with the many, and the fattened calf is killed and a party thrown when the prodigal son finally returns home.

Perhaps reality doesn't always turn out to be gruesome when the coarse curtains are drawn aside. As C.S. Lewis puts it, oil and vinegar, Jekyll and Hyde - fix your eyes on either and it claims to be the sole truth. Joy in all its paradoxes. Perhaps that's why it makes our stories so difficult to narrate. Perhaps, it might help to realise that we haven't quite got the full story. Perhaps we are really, part of a bigger Story.