Defining joy

If you know me well, you're probably aware that I really like to put my finger on things.  Before you get weirded out, don't worry - it's a metaphor, a way of me saying that I'm the bizarre type of perfectionist that won't even bother pulling my hammer out of the tool belt if there's not chance of me hitting the nail square on the head.  Aside from making me maddeningly slow at building stuff (that's not a metaphor - ask the construction crew I worked with back in '07), this trait also makes it quite frustrating for me to think  about problems for which there's no clearly definable answer.  Although my recent foray into postmodern/poststructuralist literature has helped me come to terms with this side of me a little better, it's far from quelled my desire to turn craggy mountains into neatly analyzed molehills.  

As you can imagine, this doesn't exactly make my experiments with Christianity (some might call it a "faith walk") a jaunt in the park.  In contrast to the picture that that Billy Graham Crusade rerun painted for you on CTS the other day, the Christian narrative isn't simple - there are more than a few concepts that will throw anyone who tries to squeeze them into a tidy box for a loop.  Become like little children, sure - just make sure you bring daddy along to explain the big words.

Recently, I decided to try and tackle one of the more enormous ones: joy.  Being the good student of history that I am, I was sure that the consumption of a couple books by famous scholars would answer all of my questions, and pave the way for a wonderfully lucid blog exposition of the meaning of this elusive little three-letter word.  

Wrong.  Brushing off the blank stares of my pastor and church librarian that accompanied my initial inquiry, I promptly checked out C.S. Lewis' Surprised By Joy, thinking the Great Sage of Belfast would undoubtedly offer a comprehensive definition.  To my disappointment, the concluding paragraph of this otherwise enjoyable work made me feel as if had actually lost ground in my quest for clarity regarding joy:

But what, in conclusion, of Joy? for that, after all, is what the story has mainly been about.  To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian... I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it.

Clive Staples, you have got to be kidding me.  Did I seriously just sit through 190 pages of you describing the meals you ate at yuppy prep school to hear that the central theme of the book didn't actually, in the great scheme of things, end up meaning a whole lot to you?  Anticlimactic is an understatement - this was borderline distressing.  

As I think about it a bit more, though, I really shouldn't have been too surprised/disappointed. Perhaps joy is something infinitely subjective, the meaning of which is totally based on the specific stories of individuals or communities.  Maybe the fact that my trusty Nave's Topical Bible Reference System highlights instances of joy ranging from warriors experiencing it on the battlefield in the Old Testament, to angels expressing it upon the birth of Christ, suggests that the only way of truly understanding it is to consider it a narrative.  Something that doesn't hold a definition that spans people, cultures, and creeds.  If this is the case, should even a teacher of such stature as Lewis be expected to form it into a universal theory?

Immediately after finishing Lewis, I began sinking my teeth into a significantly thicker package of pulp: Dominique LaPierre's epic The City of Joy.  Whether my subconscious deemed it worthy due to the presence of "joy" in the title, or simply because it looked long enough to last me through the long journey home from Australia and then some, I don't know; all I'm sure about is that it made me reconsider my drive to define joy objectively, and instead approach the topic in a way more reminiscent of the ideas proposed in the previous paragraph.  Details on the City of Joy next time, hopefully tomorrow.