Surprised by joy

Beauty can be found in the oddest of things

My favourite movie of all time is “A Christmas Story” because it parallels so many memories of my childhood.  My dad fought with the furnace as soot blew through the radiators.  We had a neighbour who insisted on bringing his 3 or 4 rambunctious dogs into our house.  Christmas involved a lot of snow and looking into storefront windows to lust after particular toys.  And I desperately wanted a Red Ryder BB gun.  And even more strange, my mother said, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”  And I almost did.  The movie cracks me up.

The scene where brother Randy is claiming all the toys, is priceless,

“And this is mine!  And oh wow!  This is mine too!”

Ralphie looks for his gun-shaped gift and is disappointed in not finding it.  Then he is forced to wear the pink bunny pyjamas sent by a not-so-favourite aunt.  And then his dad directs him to look in a certain place.  And there it is… a Red Ryder BB gun!  The look on his face is reminiscent of what C. S. Lewis described as surprised by joy.  The movie cleverly made it clear that Ralphie’s experience was categorically different in its fundamentals from that of Randy.

Recently I bought new tires for my truck because even I couldn’t ignore the fact there was no longer any tread on the current tires and, as expensive as tires have become, they weren’t going to get any less expensive.  When I drove away with my new tires, I couldn’t believe how much of a difference they made to the driving experience.  With balanced tires, it was no longer hard to hold the steering wheel at speeds over 70 kilometers per hour.  The steering wheel felt a lot more “positive” now that there was enough tread to grip the road rather than to skate along the asphalt surface. 

The experience gave me a pang of what I can only call Joy.  And perhaps it was like Ralphie’s feeling as he opened his Christmas present.  Bear in mind that I had just spent $1200 which is not easy for cheapskates like me.  Yet there it was… a feeling that I was more aligned with the Truth of the universe.

This was not the first time that I have had this experience with joy.  Some years ago, I had occasion to do some repairs in our cabin requiring that I climb over a hot water tank into a small space behind a vertical washer/dryer.  In balancing myself to jump into the space, I pressed against a window that shattered and drove a long piece of glass deep into my forearm.  There was a lot of blood and much more to come if I pulled out the glass, but I couldn’t get out of the small space with the shard stuck in my arm.  My wife handed me something to make a tourniquet, and I pulled out the glass and got back over the hot water tank.  I have hated this part of our cabin ever since. 

This summer I removed the hot water tank, replaced the floor, removed the window and now have easy access to the back of the washer/dryer.  Nothing I have ever done has given me so much joy as that little project.  It was more than happiness or satisfaction.  I was correctly tracking the universe in that moment.

The birth of my children certainly brought me into greater alignment with the universe and those three jolts of joy were intense.  At least for awhile.  Finding car keys or a credit card after days of hunting also has resulted in a sense of intense joy.  The Bible tells the story of the widow who finds a lost coin and the joy which she felt.  We can call these common graces in that they come unexpectedly and may have minor or major impact on the rest of our lives.  It doesn’t seem to matter.  In the words of Lewis,

… it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again... But then Joy is never in our power…

I was thinking about all this lately as I noticed the architectural styles of the new buildings in my community.  Highrise offices, lowrise apartments and individual homes are becoming, in my view, intolerably ugly.  The style is cubic form dressed up with kindergarten primary in terms of colour.  In fact, the average five-year-old probably has a better sense of colour arrangement than today’s architects.

“But Murray… dude… you are an engineer.  What would one expect from you?  Esthetic is not in your vocabulary.”

Perhaps.  But in my defense, I was once the literary critic for an English language internet site in Peru.  As such I went to stage plays almost every weekend and wrote brilliant, critical reviews of the performances.  Well maybe not so brilliant but not so terrible that my audience didn’t grow.  So, in my mind at least, I am an esthete.

The point to all this is that being surprised by joy involves an almost painful sense of beauty.  That which was lost has been found involves a beautiful confluence of universal forces.  Returning a washing machine corner to a place to wash clothes rather than a small chamber of horrors involves a sense of universal beauty.  The Red Ryder BB gun is in the hands of the only human capable of loving it for what it is probably brought a tear to the eyes of Ralphie’s father if not my parents.  Certainly, seeing flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones in the squalling incarnations of my children was a thing of profound beauty that had nothing to do with their wrinkled, pink, writhing bodies.  

Looking at modern architecture or at most modern art does not elicit pangs of joy.  Such art, in my mind, is devoid of transcendent beauty.  The art does not refocus the fuzzy picture of this world such that one senses a coincidence with universal Truths.

I believe that the old stab, the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life whatever. But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.

The truth is that, while I am convinced that beauty is objective and not just a set of preferences, I am having difficulty defining that beauty.  It must be transcendent but how does one know what is transcendent?  Must I only define beauty by what gives me a pang of joy?  The experience is so rare that this would suggest that there is very little beauty to be found, and I don’t believe that to be true.

But perhaps beauty is related to joy in that pangs of joy are the periodic reminders that beauty is in our midst in strange and unusual ways.  Lewis would go further and say that the pangs of joy are the pointers to the ultimate source of the beauty.

“If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them… Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”

In a history class that I taught we discussed the art of the Italian and Dutch / Northern Renaissance.  Why was there such an explosion of classical art?  What inspired it and why were there so many gifted artists during that time?  Was the explosion of art just a fluke or was there a shift in worldview that resulted in a burst of creative energy?  The students were assigned an essay on beauty and some of their thoughts were remarkable.

In my next essay I want to examine beauty.  I think beauty is intimately involved with worldview and, if you follow a Judeo-Christian worldview then understanding beauty necessarily involves a discussion of freedom and creativity, gardens and beginnings, old things passing and new things coming, collapse and redemption, uniqueness and transcendence, truth and untruth, Heaven and Hell.  I think Plato has a lot to say about beauty as does Jesus and Paul.  Discussing beauty involves deep thinking so I will include the thoughts of my students.

Being an engineer, I am unlikely to open our minds to new insights into beauty but in a world that seems to be increasingly ugly, it is worth lifting our eyes, if only for a time, to the sunlit uplands of deeper thought. And I hope it will cause you to chime in with your own thoughts about beauty.