“Serious business.” How’s your heart rate when you hear this phrase? Which scenarios leap to mind? A hardship, maybe? A significant task with your name on it, perhaps one considerably overdue? Or much larger challenges impacting us all on the societal, even global scale? Tragedies, too, which proliferate?
“Joy” is certainly not the first thing that pops into my mind when I hear “serious business.” Some time ago I picked this line from C.S. Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm (Letter 17) as my favourite Lewis quote, and the one that I feel best encapsulates what he was all about. His sentence, “Joy is the serious business of Heaven,” so startles me that I’ve chosen to keep it before me as a frequent wake-up call. When the serious things of life cause me to fret and frown, when they loom up with a suddenness designed to threaten despair, to overshadow every memory of all the good that ever was and is and is to come, this claim from Lewis’s book on prayer feels counter-intuitive—or, more precisely, feels foreign to much of life on this planet.
But like all good surprises, the claim about the nature of Heaven as joy corrects, consoles, inspires. Joy—yes! As Jesus tells us, “that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). This Jesus, “a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering” (Isaiah 53:3), this “Man of Sorrows” speaks Joy to us, Joy in the now and Joy in the world to come beyond our imagining. This, this heavenly joy is what we are made for. Every cell of our being is made for joy—not sorrow, but joy. In the face of life’s serious hardships, what are we to do with Jesus’s call to joy? Now, here, in the nitty-gritty details of inescapable burdens and distresses, how can heavenly Joy impact us?
Lewis portrays heavenly joy in terms of play and dance, as instances that may feel frivolous, even cruel, in the face of life’s irksome and outright distressing circumstances. Frivolity is an interesting word. The Oxford English Dictionary definition includes these meanings: “Of little or no weight, value, or importance; not worthy of serious attention; given to trifling, silly; futile.” And Lewis notes that the reason we experience joy as frivolity in the negative sense is that here on earth joy is not (or shall we say, no longer is) its “natural place.” Here, joy is an interlude, a momentary delight, a lovely joke, an outburst of marvelous laughter. There, in the “better country,” joy “is the End of ends.” Here we have glimpses, inklings; there we will revel in it evermore. Revelry—righteous revelry, unending holy hilarity—our destiny! What a thought.
So, how might heavenly joy inspire us “in this ‘valley of tears’”? Lewis writes that it helped him to begin where he was. Rather than attempt to begin prayer with faith in the grand metanarrative of God’s creation and redemption and “’all the blessings of this life,’” he advises to begin with the immediate sensory experience before us. He begins with the example of a brook, splashing his face and hands in the waterfall, and says how that coolness, sound, and light replaces faith with sight. No longer abstract, that pleasure becomes one of the “shafts of glory.” He experiences that sweetness as a “message” from its origin in the heavenly country, a “tiny theophany” which to participate in “is itself to adore”—that is, to adore the nature of the One who sent this brightness.
No pleasure, properly received (not stolen, which is “sacrilege”), is too insignificant to contemplate. They abound, such as in
- a morning cup of coffee
- a raindrop gently gliding down a windowpane
- a newborn babe’s wide-eyed gaze
- a passer-by’s sudden smile
- a dear friend’s word remembered
- an unexpected strength
- the scent of a summer rose
- a sudden stirring of hope
- the opening notes of a favourite piece of music
- the breeze wafting towards you
- a serene moment.
Meanwhile, when my spirit faints within me, when I feel overwhelmed, I want to hold onto the promise that God knows the steps that I will be able to walk (Psalm 142:3). And once again, sooner or later, I will catch a glimpse of this Joy that is the serious business of Heaven. As in the words of the Canadian poet Sally Ito, I wish to be “Alert to Glory.”
These and countless other “pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.” With attentiveness, they are blessings consciously received and can become reminders of the best that is yet to come. No matter what, the best is yet to come—God says so, and therefore we can count on it.
P.S. I hope that you read Letter 17 in Letters to Malcolm, or indeed much else of Lewis’s.
For now, I wish you a blessed summer season with many instances of Heavenly joy.
Thanks for reading, for listening.
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Monika Hilder 