Tag: joy

The Road to Joy

I have used C. S. Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, every time I have taught my Lewis class at the university. I’ve also used it in an adult class at my church. The title perfectly expresses the end result of Lewis’s early life as he finally turned to Christ. For years, he sought something he defined as “joy.” Three moments in his childhood stood out to him with respect to his quest for joy. The first was when he “stood… Read more »

We Shall Get In

I concluded my class, “C. S. Lewis on Life, Death, and Eternity,” this past Monday evening. In the previous session, we looked at Lewis’s poignant thoughts after the death of his wife, Joy, in A Grief Observed. As significant as that reading is—and it affects many people deeply—I didn’t want to end the class on that note. I preferred that we finish with a joyful glimpse into the essence of the Christian life and the hope of eternity. For that… Read more »

Joy: A Signpost, Not a Destination

“In a sense,” C. S. Lewis wrote in his autobiography, “the central story of my life is about nothing else.” What was that “nothing else”? He continued, “It is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Now he comes to the point: “I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure.” I presume that most people today would not see any… Read more »

Only the Scent or Echo of the Real Thing

“What does not satisfy when we find it,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “was not the thing we were desiring.” That short statement came in the middle of his first Christian book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, and it summarizes the whole point of the book, wherein the protagonist comes back to the Christian faith that he didn’t desire at the outset of his journey: he finally realizes that what he was running away from was the real thing after all. The book… Read more »

Lewis: Delighting in God

Lewis’s exuberance in the faith shines through in many of his writings, whether they be apologetic or fiction. One of his later books, Reflections on the Psalms, contains nuggets like these: The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express that same delight in God which made David dance. There . . . I find an experience fully God-centered, asking of God no gift more urgently than His presence, the gift of Himself, joyous to the highest… Read more »

Lewis: Joy Fulfilled

C. S. Lewis wrote often of his search for Joy (which he always capitalized). As a non-Christian, it was an inconsolable longing for something always beyond reach. As a Christian, it took on an entirely new quality. In his autobiography, Surprised By Joy, he goes into some detail about what it meant to him. I’ll let him share now: In a sense, the central story of my life is about nothing else. . . . It is that of an… Read more »

Lewis: Stop Making Mud Pies

“The Weight of Glory,” a sermon delivered by C. S. Lewis at Oxford in 1941, has to rank in the upper echelons of all his thinking/writing. It is filled with memorable images. One of the best is this one: If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics… Read more »