Desiring JOY

So this week I decided that I was bored of my own thoughts while standing on the metro, so I began to bring along a book, and as long as there aren’t a thousand people pressing up against me, I am able to read quite easily and without much distraction. I picked up a book I had started several years ago, Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis. It is the “intensely intimate and sincere autobiography of a man who thought his way to God” (back cover). I have become wrapped up in pondering a certain concept he talks about.
Throughout the book he takes the reader through his childhood, schooldays, his experiences in World War I, and his undergraduate life at Oxford, until he finally stepped out of his atheism back to Christianity. He has many mini “revelations” along his life journey, one of which is about his search for Joy.

That walk I now remembered. It seemed to me that I had tasted heaven then. If only such a moment could return! But what I never realized was that it had returned—that the remembering of that walk was itself a new experience of just the same kind. True, it was desire, not possession. But then what I had felt on the walk had also been itself desirable, is the fullest possession we can know on earth; or rather, because the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing.

I had to read this “revelation” several times before I think I know what he says. He writes that to desire Joy- the experience of anticipating a joyous experience- is just as wonderful as having possession of it. In other words, the very act of desiring causes one to desire it more. It causes one to remember that experience, which creates a new experience, that of possessing the desire for the experience, which is Joy.
When I use this analogy about God, the fact that I continually desire more and more of Him- I can never truly have possession of Him- brings me to that unwavering joy; that peace and deep contentment that is Joy. If I have experienced something, the desire of it again creates that experience in my head and once again I feel the Joy I felt before. In a sense, I do possess what I want.
However, there are many things that I desire that are not based on a memory and then the possession of it is more than the act of desiring it. For example, this family of mine! I was expecting a package; wanting it to come (well- in a sense though I was imagining how I would feel when I got it… hmm…) but when it did come, it was even greater than my desire for it. I was surprised by some things that were in it, and once I possessed it, my desire was fulfilled. I do not still desire the package, I have it and the joy is stronger than the joy experience in the expectation of it.
But that can also be used as an analogy for God actually- experiencing the Joy Christ brings, is greater than the expectation of it, but we won’t know the fullness until we desire it. Maybe it’s not the act of desiring that evokes the Joy, but the continual blessings, surprises and answered prayers we experience when we desire God. If we truly desire God, we will be obedient to Him, and he will bless us.
So- does C.S. Lewis write that possessing desire as Joy- only when that desire is based on remembering a good and wonderful experience? Maybe the possession is the possession of the completion of Desire, which also is found in God. When we desire God, we continue to desire Him more, and therefore, we have possessed the ultimate Joy, desiring God.