Joy and Letting Go

I have a hard time letting go of the things I love; my impulse at such times is to sink in my teeth and nails and hold on for dear life, unfortunately such a reaction never works and often makes the feeling worse. My entire life, God has been teaching me this lesson – all joys involve a little loss. Well, almost all joys for there is never an end to the enjoyment of God, only an increasing. And this is, I suppose, what earthly joys were intended to do, to lead us to the Eternal Joy. It is in the experiences of the best kinds of earthly joys that we begin most to desire the joys of heaven. C. S. Lewis writes in Till We Have Faces,

[Psyche] ‘I have always — at least, ever since I can remember — had a kind of longing for death.’ [Orual] ‘Ah, Psyche, have I made you so little happy as that?’ [Psyche] “No, no no. You don’t understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine…where you couldn’t see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.

Psyche also says, “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” C. S. Lewis, of course, makes this longing one of the central themes of The Horse and His Boy as well. In Mere Christianity, Lewis writes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” For the Christian, the desire for heaven – the desire for the presence of God – ought to be at the center of all joys. All joys ought to point him to the place where there will be no more tears. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis writes, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

Earthly joys are fleeting, because they are only foretastes of greater blessings to come. As such, they cannot be clutched at if they are to be enjoyed properly. All earthly joys are tinged with the sadness of loss. But rather than allowing that sadness to turn focus inward, to refuse the earthly joys, or to clutch on to them past remaining joyful, that sadness of loss ought to orient ourselves towards the eternal joys of heaven. Through them, God whispers promises of greater Love and Joy and draws mankind to Himself. But those earthly joys must not be confused with the eternal Joy; they are not ends in themselves. “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are

restless until they rest in thee” (St. Augustine, Confessions, I.1). When earthly joys are enjoyed as ends in themselves they can lead either to insatiability or despair – insatiability because earthly joys do not ultimately fulfill, despair because without the eternal Joy, all joys end in loss. St. Augustine calls such thinking “marvelous shallowness” (City of God, XIX.4) This despair can be seen most clearly in the fear of death; death involves the loss or leaving behind much of what is held most dear – spouse, friends, children, one’s life’s work. But death, properly understood, is only the ending of the earthly joys and the beginning of the joys that never fade; death then is not to be dreaded but is “a consummation/Devoutly to be wished.” St. Augustine writes of the goodness of death “as we cannot attain to [the supreme good] in the present life, however ardently we desire it…Salvation, such as it shall be in the world to come, shall itself be our final happiness.” Ibid.

But the experience of earthly joys can also be a kind of death. There is the last time you see a friend, the last time you look at your home before moving, that last caress before burying a pet, the last class with a favorite professor, the last page of a book – in all of these, we die a little. St. Augustine writes in The City of God (XIII.10) “For no sooner do we begin to live in this dying body, then we begin to move ceaselessly towards death….Man, then, is never in life from the moment he dwells in this dying rather than living body – if, at least, he cannot be in life and death at once.” This is more than merely biologically true. But we are ever grounded in the glorious hope of the eternal Joy experienced in our release from temporality. And it is properly ordering our loves that allows us to truly experience earthly joys. Again, St. Augustine writes (XIV.7), “Love, then, yearning to have what is loved, is desire; and having and enjoying it, is joy…Now these motions are evil if the love is evil; good if the love is good.” When the experience of earthly joys turns our desire towards the eternal Joy, our love for them is good.

St. Augustine further explains the difference between earthly temporal joys and the eternal Joy (XIV.25),

But even the righteous does not live as he wishes until he has arrived where he cannot die, be deceived, or injured, and until he is assured that this shall be his eternal condition. For this nature demands; and nature is not fully and perfectly blessed till it attains what it seeks. But what man is at present able to live as he wishes, when it is not in his power so much as to live? He wishes to live, he is compelled to die….or if he wishes to die, how can he live as he wishes since he does not even wish to live? Or if he wishes to die, not because he dislikes life, but that after death he may live better, still he is not yet living as he wishes…

St. Augustine realizes that blessedness is only possible when it is eternal; this is because blessedness must be possessed, and nothing can truly be possessed when that possession is temporal. In temporality, there is ultimately only loss.

For a blessed life is possessed only by the man who loves it. If it is loved and possessed, it must necessarily be more ardently loved than all besides; for whatever else is loved must be loved for the sake of the blessed life. And if it is loved as it deserves to be – and the man is not blessed who does not love the blessed life as it deserves – then he who so loves it cannot but wish it to be eternal. Therefore it shall only be blessed when it is eternal. Ibid.

The earthly joys, as Lewis writes, are whispers that God uses to align us more closely to Himself. St. Augustine agrees (XIX.13)

God, then, the most wise Creator and most just Ordainer of all natures, who placed the human race upon earth as its greatest ornament, imparted to men some good things adapted to this life, to wit, temporal peace, such as we can enjoy in this life from health and safety and human fellowship…the objects wish are accommodated to our outward senses, light, night, the air, and waters suitable for us, and everything the body requires to sustain, shelter, heal, or beautify it: and all under this most equitable condition, that every man who made a good use of these advantages suited to the peace of his mortal condition, should receive ampler and better blessings, namely, the peace of immortality, accompanied by glory and honour in an endless life made fit for the enjoyment of God and of one another in God; but that he who used the present blessings badly should both lose them and should not receive the others.

God is both the source (I Corinthians 6:17) and end of all joys. Living without recognizing the earthly joys would seem to demonstrate a perverse denial of God’s gifts not unlike the rejection of the gift of grace in salvation. Similarly, misunderstanding those gifts as ends rather than

means, like grace, of drawing closer to God, perversely destroys those gifts and the possibility for true joy. This

earthly joys beyond their appointed span; I must not allow the gift of friendship to become an end in itself and is the lesson God has been teaching me my whole life and a lesson I still am learning. I must not seek to sustain

from it seek the love and satisfaction that only God can give. I must not lose sight of the heavenly, eternal Joy that is at the root of all earthly joys nor the Love that begets all other proper loves. In surrendering to that Joy and that Love, “my desire and my will/[can be] turned like a wheel, all at one speed,/by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars” (Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII.142-145)

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