This notion of “choosing our response to life’s circumstances” tended to strike me as the kind of pitiful, embarrassing guidance you might find in a spineless self-help book. I held a philosophy that valued grief and disappointment as somehow more poignant than joy and gladness, seeing the latter two as exhibited by the slightly ignorant and/or delusional. I had unwittingly adopted a kind of scholar’s melancholy: the realest feelings are the heaviest feelings, and levity is mere flippancy in the face of the human condition. An irony of my year at philosophical Oxford is that, of all places in the world, this was the one where my imagination began to thaw as I discovered and embraced the “joyful laughter that echoes through Creation” as some theologian put it. I had not expected this, and celebrate the surprise.
CS Lewis played an integral role in this spring awakening, as though his mirth reached through heavenly spans into my life. Other’s words can do that, can reach across generations and personalities to meaningfully grace our lives. One of my tutorials was on Lewis’s writings, which meant that I was in constant , if pretend, conversation with him – my mind was always full with his thoughts, words, delightfully witty prose, and insight. A central theme I discovered in his work was his notion of a jovial reality: at its core, the universe in which we live springs from beneficence and love, that it isn’t the victim (or result) of meaningless, destructive chaos. Having matured during the height of the Modernist movement, Lewis recognized a disconcerting cultural trend that assumed the latter perception about reality, which was undoubtedly influenced by the two World Wars. This notion bothered Lewis, who had fought in WWI and lived near London during the Nazi bombing raids of WWII, for he saw it as an alarming and unreasonable turn from belief in a loving God who cares for each of his beings, flaws, virtues, and peculiarities included, yet who allows them to act of their own accord.
For Lewis, grief, disappointment, and pain were real things, and each had significant weight in his life. Yet he found a deep conviction in providence, in “the laughter of things beyond the tears of things,” as Frederick Buechner puts it. The laughter of Sarah at the news of her pregnancy, her son who she ends up naming Isaac, Hebrew for “laughter.” The laughter of the lame man made healthy near the pool called “Beautiful.” The laughter of a mangy, broke street performer when you plop your bag of loose change at his feet. The laughter when you feel the embrace of a loved one after months apart.
It seems to me that Lewis’s confidence in a joyful reality came from his belief that when we pray “Thy Kingdom come,” God’s Kingdom really does come through into our world in the midst of our loneliness and confusion and sorrow and helplessness. We often imagine God’s Kingdom coming as a shocking, publicized, international political overthrow, something that declares itself in flashing lights, yet Jesus talked about it differently, describing it as like finding a buried diamond, or as yeast working in a loaf of bread. It’s a surprise when we notice it, yet it’s happening all around us, inside and outside of church walls, through Christians and nonChristians alike. It’s happening in particulars. It isn’t happening in a way measurable by our mechanical standards, as though we could post time lines that measure incremental Kingdom-arrival like donations for building projects: Creation will always be groaning until the end of time.
Until then, God’s Kingdom – his rule, his way of doing things – is sprouting up like fresh grass through cracks in a city sidewalk. It has taken some time for this notion of God working his redeeming, restoring way into our world to sink in, probably because my imagining of his Kingdom is so influenced by stories of coercive, heartless, industrial and capital expansion that deal in abstract numbers and impersonal aims; our imaginations need re-training to recover realities of God’s character and love and joy.
While preparing to head to Oxford, I imagined that I would meet intelligent people, read and write overwhelmingly much, and learn a different culture. These things all happened, in one way or another, yet I could never have predicted the conversations I would have, what I actually would read and write and learn, how I would change. These particulars invariably surprised me. I grew thankful of the surprises, and began to trust what I had known all along, that God loves us, that he works to fill our lives with joy as we seek and honor him. It’s a continual process, marked with uncertainty, fumbling, and grace, this seeking to live in relationship with God, yet, as we do, we learn that, beyond all religious jargon and institutionally-general assertions of God’s love from churches and churchmembers alike, God knows our hearts and our stories. He knows what we need to discover life, real life, and leads us to these sustenances. Discovering the reality of this particular love is a perpetual epiphany, one that confirms in our souls the best thing: it’s good to be who we are, where we are, alive. We need reminding. A quote from “American Beauty:”
“…That's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things and…this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember... and I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in.”
And this picture of a hot air balloon above the University:
