Hello everyone!
This is my first blog and I’m excited to test the waters of cyberspace with my humble thoughts and opinions. May what is said be an encouragement to all, to help us see and know Truth.
I find myself overwhelmed recently with the thoughts on (and of) joy, almost to a maddening degree. I echo, with the full force of sheer gladness that comes with the articulation of a feeling once thought to be only felt by me, C.S. Lewis’s description of his experience with joy in which, “I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described and then… found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.” Lewis describes his attempts to go through the same motions, not in order to gratify the desire, but to reawaken it; a desire for the desire.
Upon reflection, I here find myself drawn headfirst into reflection about my unspoken quest to find joy. That stab, that pang, that inconsolable longing. Who has not had this desire in one form or another? Whether it be a sunset on a peaceful evening, being next to a fireplace on a cold night, a freshly fallen snow, a symphony, poetry, art, Broadway… these things that we desire not necessarily in and of themselves but because of the overwhelming sense of something that they produce in us. Oh how the thought of this has shaped in my mind in regards to beauty. How I would listen to a song again and again to try to reawaken the desire. My craving was not satisfied in the mere listening to of the music, but in the reawakening of the desire. So it seems that the Desire, the intense longing one feels through a means perhaps unique to oneself, is distinctive because it is a desire for itself, not for the thing that produces it.
So then, I would follow these thoughts with an interesting implication on what it means to appreciate art. It seems that this feeling, this desire that beauty can produce is what is meant by the appreciation of art, the means to the end of why we appreciate art. Would we want to listen to music or look at/experience art if it didn’t produce any feeling in us?
Yet the question of what exactly is the object of this desire still lingers? So many things might produce joy in us, but none of these things ever satisfies. My thoughts in this area are still very immature, and yet the answer seems so obvious… God. I do not want to make it an impersonal answer (in the same way that one might intellectually “know” who God is but not be utterly overwhelmed and gripped by that knowledge, which would imply an incomplete and faulty knowing of God). It is beyond words to try to express what it is to have this desire and focus it in proper proportion to its Object. Why singing a hymn can make us fall on our knees in tears at the realization that this pang and this longing are met perfectly in God, perfectly in Christ… This is what I would call worship, and this is a huge motivation for me, to desire others to see this too, to feel what it is to grasp the Gospel and know the Lord. Oh that people might see! That they might know Jesus, that they might know the Cross, that they might be vessels of mercy! I desire to experience this joy, allowing it to pour over into worship of the Creator.
