The Longing Called Joy

He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. ECCLESIASTES 3:11

If there is one experience that runs beneath everything Lewis wrote, it is a longing. He first knew it as a very small child, and he went on knowing it all his life. It would come without warning, stirred by the oddest things — a toy garden of moss and twigs in a biscuit-tin lid, the autumn mood of a children’s story, a line of poetry about the death of a northern god, the sight of distant hills from a nursery window. For a moment he would be pierced by a desire so intense that it was almost pain, and then it would be gone, and he would be left wanting nothing so much as to feel it again. He gave this experience a name. He called it Joy, and he used the old German word Sehnsucht for the longing at its heart.

Not happiness, not pleasure

Lewis was careful to say what Joy was not. It was not happiness, which is a settled condition, nor pleasure, which is a satisfaction. Joy, as he used the word, was a wanting, not a having; and yet he prized that wanting above any having he had known. It had a strange double quality. It was a pang of loss and a breath of home at the same moment.

The trouble was that he could not hold it, and he could not find out what it was for. As a young man he chased it through every door he could think of. He tried to find it again in the books and music that had first stirred it, and found that the harder he went looking for the feeling, the more surely it fled. He wondered whether it was a disguised form of sexual desire, and found that it was not: the one could be satisfied, and the other plainly could not. He tried the occult, and found it a dead end. Every object he fixed on turned out to be only the place where the longing had touched down, not the thing it was longing for.

My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God. PSALM 84:2

The argument from desire

Out of this experience Lewis drew one of the arguments for which he is best remembered. He set it out in several places — in Mere Christianity, in the sermon The Weight of Glory, and in the preface he wrote for a later edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress. In our own words, and with our own examples, it runs something like this.

The desires that are built into us, as a rule, answer to something real that can meet them. Thirst is matched by water, weariness by sleep, loneliness by friendship. A particular person may of course go thirsty or lonely, and a desire may go unmet in a particular life; but the existence of the appetite is itself a sign that its object exists somewhere. Suppose, then, that we find in ourselves a desire that nothing in this world can meet — a desire that every earthly good awakens and none fulfils. The natural inference is that its true object lies beyond this world altogether, and that we are creatures meant for more than this world can give. On that view the good things of earth have a different job from the one we usually give them. They are not there to quench the longing. They are there to wake it, and to point past themselves.

For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come. HEBREWS 13:14

Lewis did not pretend that this argument amounts to a proof. A determined sceptic can always say that the longing is a trick of the nerves, a leftover of evolution, or a sign that the universe is simply cruel. But he thought it was a pointer of great power, because it fits the experience of countless people who have never put it into words. Augustine had said the same thing fifteen centuries earlier, at the opening of his Confessions: the human heart is restless until it rests in God. Lewis was describing that restlessness from the inside.

Three ways of dealing with it

He noticed that people tend to deal with this longing in one of three ways. Some blame the things that aroused it. They suppose that if only they had a different spouse, a better house, a more exciting holiday, a more beautiful place to live, the longing would at last be satisfied; and so they spend their lives moving from one object to the next, always disappointed and always hoping. Others, sobered by experience, decide that the whole thing was a youthful illusion. They settle down, stop expecting much, and smile at the dreams of the young. They are often decent and practical people, and they have shut a door that ought to have stayed open.

The third way, Lewis said, is the Christian one. It neither despises the longing nor mistakes its object. It recognises that earthly goods are real goods, to be enjoyed with thanks, and that they are also messengers. The beauty of a landscape or a piece of music is not the thing we were made for, but it is a true message from the country we were made for. The right response is to be grateful for the message, and to go on towards the One who sent it.

One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple. PSALM 27:4

When the longing has done its work

This led Lewis to a striking conclusion about his own story. After his conversion, he found that the old stabs of Joy came less often and mattered less to him. He was not troubled by it. He had discovered what they had been for. A lamp left burning in a window means everything to a traveller out on a dark night; once he is through the door and sitting by the fire with his family, he does not go back out to stare at the lamp. The longing had done its work. It had kept him restless, kept him from settling for anything less, and finally brought him to the One it had been pointing to all along.

That does not mean that the Christian outgrows longing. Lewis believed that the believer, too, lives in a world full of such messengers, and that every good thing in it — friendship, marriage, the sea, the hills, great books, good food — carries a hint of a joy that has not yet been given. The Christian hope is not that our desires will be extinguished, but that they will at last be met.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. PSALM 16:11

Weighing it

There is much here that is simply biblical. The Scriptures everywhere describe a thirst that only God can quench, and Lewis’s account of it has helped many readers name something they had felt all their lives. Two cautions are worth adding.

The first is that longing is not the same as faith. A man may feel the ache for another world his whole life and never turn to Christ; indeed, the ache can be cultivated for its own sake, as a kind of refined melancholy. Lewis knew this danger well, because he had fallen into it. Desire may point to God, but it is the gospel that brings us to Him, and the way home is not through our feelings but through the cross.

Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst. JOHN 4:13–14

The second is that the argument from desire is persuasive chiefly to those who already feel the desire. It is a door that opens from the inside. That is not a reason to set it aside; it is a reason to use it wisely, alongside the plainer preaching of sin and grace, and never instead of it.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think back over your life. When have you felt a longing that nothing in this world could satisfy? What stirred it?

2. Which of the three ways of dealing with longing have you tended to follow — chasing new objects, giving up, or following the message home?

3. Name one good thing in your life that you have been asking to satisfy you completely. Thank God for it, and give it back its proper place.

4. Read Psalm 84 slowly. Notice how the writer’s longing is directed to God Himself.

5. Read the opening pages of Augustine’s Confessions in the Ochorus library, and compare his restless heart with Lewis’s Joy.

A PRAYER

Lord, You have set eternity in my heart, and nothing under the sun can fill it.

Forgive me for asking Your gifts to be my God, and for blaming them when they could not satisfy me.

Thank You for every beauty that has stirred my longing. Let each of them point me past itself to You.

Bring me at last to the country I was made for, and to the fulness of joy in Your presence, through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.