Christians have often been somewhat hobbled in their lives, even in their legitimate recreational interests, by nagging doubts about having fun. Many have believed the puritanical maxim: It is good for the soul to take one’s pleasures sadly. The loss of the sense of pleasure on the part of many Christians, even so many in the general population, is disappointing. There ought to be a call by those who know about such matters to restore to mankind the sense and privilege of relaxed thought to joy. Fun may be silly, or crude, or bizarre, in standard cultures. God’s joy is not made of silliness or crudity, but of the bright side from righteousness, and helpful to Christian life.
C. S. Lewis is remembered as an unauthorized evangelist for joy. Joy was his expression for some elements of sublimity. He might have used the word sublime on occasion but must have felt that Christians would take the word sublime as limited to the leading artists in their fields. Doubters may feel there is sublimity for persons in art, music, religion, or science, but the common person is too close to the earth to analyze it as cause for high wonder. Lewis would have everyone enter sublime experiences with God. He wrote: Have we not all experienced sudden moments of suspension during which our hearts and minds are lifted up? Tugged by a yearning for ‘something other,’ something rich and strange, and this is the vital part, that our natural, merely human world cannot supply. What can possibly be the source of this yearning, this event of joy? Lewis believed that the very desire for joy was evidence that he was made for more than this world. The author of divine desire in mankind was also the provider of that joy. This became known as part of Lewis’s apologetics – the argument from desire. Perhaps Lewis used joy rather than sublime because joy appears to be clearer and available to ordinary men and women. Boethius held out for sublime many centuries ago, and found it in the highest uses of language, in rhetoric and poetry – also argued about in our day. Youths of today find awesome to be a favorite word, but they lose its force because they commonly apply it to ordinary, even if modestly pleasant, experiences. Awesome rightly belongs to the sublime, but has, like many words, been reduced to lesser meaning. It is common for mankind to reduce and inflate the boundaries for life.
One can, if he or she gives mind to it, achieve joy – related to the sublime, the awesome, and the ecstatic. That there is a continuum from ordinary joys to the elevations of the sublime there ought to be no doubt. Why do we not travel along the rising continuum to the elevations? It does take some time in any field to gain heights. In matters of faith and God, it takes prayer, the discovery of Scripture, the change of heart from natural to spiritual concentrations, the awareness of the constant nearness of Christ to all that we are and do. There are changes in any culture, and differences in cultures. The life of the Spirit is so unique within one’s general culture that it constitutes a second culture to be beneficially shared with the general culture of the community.
On the death of my wife, I wondered what the future held for me in loneliness, in life activity, in the severing of more than a half century relationship. I found that there is an escape from futility and despair. It came in a sense of fulfillment as a quality of sublimity founded on a living and personal relationship with God, in Christ. So it was that I found a singular contentment that I did not fully absorb until she left me. It is at height in prayer, and felt in every-day life, especially with our children and opportunities given of God. It is a context of all good things that include even my distractions, and beyond to Scripture – and Holy Spirit presence. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020