"Finally I woke from building the temple to find that God had flown."
He went on to talk about a present that he had received from his father one Christmas. After receiving this gift he could remember many details of the moments around the time that he looked forward to enjoying it.
"That walk now I 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 moment 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 desire, and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is 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. Therefore, to have is to want and to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing."
There's a lot going on in that quote. But to paraphrase it I would have to say that we receive joy not in attaining a goal. It's the journey, desire, the feeling that we get when we are pursuing and end destination. The destination cannot be the goal. If it is, as soon as you reach it your source of joy will end.
I should probably stop there and let that linger for a while. If it's enough for you to think about and process maybe you could come back and read this next part when you understand the first part better. But since it's in the same book and I think it's worth sharing I will go ahead with something elses that C.S. Lewis goes on to talk about in Surprised by Joy.
He talks about contemplation and enjoyment. Two things that I can relate to myself. It might be hard to believe, but I am an introvert. I've been sitting here in my room for five hours and enjoying very minute of it. You might not believe it if you saw me out during work. I could easily be found talking to people in the Ship Shop, chatting with people as I make their drink in the cafe, or laughing with somebody as we walked down one of the many hallways the ship has, but I get energized when I spend time by myself or with just a few close friends. To go along with that I am very contemplative. When I'm off by myself it's often that I'm reviewing things from the day or planning the next step of something.
"Enjoyment has nothing to do with pleasure, nor Contemplation with the contemplative life. When you see a table you "enjoy" the act of seeing and "contemplate" the table. Later, if you took up optics and thought about seeing itself, you would be contemplating seeing and enjoying the thought. In bereavement you contemplate the beloved and the beloved's death and "enjoy" the loneliness and grief; but a psychologist if he were considering you as a case of melancholia, would be contemplating your grief and enjoying your psychology. We do not "think a thought" in the same sense in which we "think somebody is unreliable." When we think a thought, "thought" is a cognate accusative. We enjoy the thought and, in so doing, contemplate the unreliability of the person.
So, when I am enjoying some of the many memories that I have I'm not necessarily enjoying that exact moment. I'm thinking about the enjoyment that I experienced while doing something weather it be an hour ago or ten years ago.
It seemed to me self-evident that one essential property of love, hate, fear, hope or desire was attention to their object. To cease thinking about or attending to the woman is, so far, to cease loving; to cease thinking about or attending to the dreaded thin is, so far, to cease being afraid. But to attend to your own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreaded object. In other words enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope's object and we interrupt this by turning around to look at hope itself. Of course the two activities can and do alternate with great rapidity; but there are distinct and incompatible....
The surest means of disarming an anger or a lust is to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure is to start examining your satisfaction. But if so, it followed that all introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try to look "inside ourselves" and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what is left behind is mainly mental images and physical sensations
If asked to summarize everything that's been covered I would have to say that
- Joy is not a destination, it is something that you experience while pursuing a destination.
- When you are doing the different acts that lead to the culmination of the desired destination you can enjoy them but only when when you take the time and stop the act.
- In contemplating the events you recall the joy that you had in that moment.
- When you turn your attention away from the destination and the acts leading up to the destination what you see isn't actually the experience it's the impression that you left that you are able to see.
I hope to use this summery when I look into scripture to see what the Bible says about joy;where it comes from, what prevents it and how we can share it.
