C S. Lewis has never been my favorite Christian writer. I admit this sheepishly, given his stature. The virtues of his most influential work, Mere Christianity, are real. But I have always found this primer in the Christian faith a bit plodding and arid, without much religious élan. Surprised by Joy, on the other hand, is the title he gave to his autobiographical account of his conversion. The book is filled with descriptions of the “stabbing” “arrows of joy” he both felt and pursued throughout his early life, seizing him in his experience of nature, aesthetics, philosophy, and finally driving him to God. By the end of the book, though, Lewis admits that, as a Christian, he “lost nearly all interest” in “joy.” He continued to feel it as before, he observes, but it no longer had a great importance to him. Lewis is wary of emotions. In Surprised by Joy, he is careful to insist that his actual conversion is unattached to feeling but rather resembles a sleeping man who gradually wakes up and becomes aware of the world around him.
Lewis borrowed his book’s title from an 1815 poem by Wordsworth of the same name. The poem opens: “Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind / I turned to share the transport.” Wordsworth wrote the poem a few years after the death of his six-year-old son. Overcome by a moment of joy, he describes the anguish of no longer having his son to turn toward and share it with.
Lewis, in his autobiography, chides the poet for somehow being stuck in his feelings, constantly trying to recapture something that ought to “point” him elsewhere. Move on! The complaint seems unfair, especially on Lewis’s own telling. Joy, he says, is something that not only surpasses all pleasure, but includes pain and anguish within it, driving us to a place—and Person—from which this joy originates in the first place. Like Wordsworth, Lewis describes joy as a “blowing wind” that is “never in our power,” fraught with “inconsolable longing” at its core. Joy is unconstrained, upwelling, overflowing, and pressing to be “shared.” As such, it is free from all critique and is the Christian’s spiritual token, the first fruits of that Gift within us who cries out “Abba.” Wordsworth wasn’t so much stuck as painfully astonished, and the pain and the astonishment are themselves facets of his surprise. There is no realm beyond joy; only the world of its full reception.
This is why killjoys are intrinsically vicious. Many killjoys are inadvertent. They’ve had a bad day and end up casting a gloomy pall on an otherwise happy gathering. But some are consistent deflators of joy: the constant complainer, the uninhibited depressive, the earnest scold. At one time, the quality of persistent dampening of joy was associated with religious rigorism eager to root out sinful pleasures, then with political judges denouncing hidden injustices. Today, the two modes of gloominess combine in the culturally inculcated and unremitting worry that taking pleasure in something is always at someone else’s expense. Joy’s contemporary enemy is not so much sorrow as guilt, manufactured or otherwise.
The assault on joy began to gather force in the eighteenth century and especially in the twentieth century, when multiple synonyms for “killjoy” emerged: “down-draught,” “spoil-sport,” “skeleton-at-the-feast,” “wet-smack,” “party-pooper,” “grinch.” The blossoming of these pejoratives, often themselves colored by the joyous pleasure of displaying the killjoy’s impertinence, signals one of the ills besetting our once incipient modernity and now petulant present: We have a hard time taking simple joy seriously these days.
What an “up-draught”—my own happy battering by something “impatient as the wind”—to have recently discovered Charles Trenet! He was one of France’s great mid-century chanteurs (1913–2001). I came across one of his songs, “La Mer” (The Sea), while working my way through Robert Dimery’s much-publicized list of 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die. First recorded in 1946, it has become one of the most performed, translated, and adapted melodies of the last century, even turning up in the children’s movie Finding Nemo. How I had missed it before is a mystery. “La Mer” is one of the most exuberant and spontaneously joyful songs I know. Lilting, sweeping, and soaring, the simple lyrics evoke the clouds and waters, colors, light, birds, skies, angels: “The sea has cradled my heart for life.”
As I discovered listening to his other songs, Trenet was a consistent oracle of free-wheeling delight in life and in the world. His musical vocation was, as with Wordsworth’s longing, to share his joy, and many of his best songs do just that. He proclaimed his joy, however, in the course of a career that had its own shadows. He was accused—though officially exonerated—of collaborating with the occupying forces during World War II: He had continued to sing for audiences that included Germans. He was a homosexual who, later in life, was arrested for his liaisons with several young men. Nonetheless, over the decades, he carried on and sang his own unvarnished expressions of joy’s surprise.
I am less perturbed by the shadows than many of Trenet’s critics. He will answer for his failings, no doubt. Moreover, his failings should not be a cause for muting his ravished delight. Sadly, we have been trained to smother. We turn joy into an occasion for critique and censure, or even for repurposed moral manipulation. That transformation happened to Trenet’s wonderful song “Boum!,” which is about the awakening of love with its propulsive graces. During World War II, it was refashioned by Resistance propagandists as a paean to blowing up the Nazis. It was a clever adaptation and pursued with, perhaps, reasonable shimmerings of happy revenge. But exploding trains had nothing to do with Trenet’s excited reveling in the sounds of birds and clocks, the colors of flowers, even God’s thundering: “When our heart goes Boom, everything with it goes Boom, and love awakens; Boom! . . . The whole world goes Boom, and everything with it goes Boom, when our heart goes Boom-boom.” This is not about a campaign to right the ills of the present. It is meant to be sung in joy’s rapture.
How tiresome is our culture of killjoys. Those who sing like Trenet are always under suspicion. Hymns of praise cannot be sung because they derive from eras of ecclesiastic exclusivity. One is trained to listen to cantatas and oratorios with ears attuned to hear the echoes of the cruel aristocrats who commissioned them. Paintings of the glorious world of sea, sky, and forest are served up with warnings about their colonialist contexts.
But make note: There is no politics of joy. Joy possesses a kind of purity. It comes to people who are good and bad, carefree or anguished, on the right side or on the wrong. Joy seeks simply to sing. Lewis was surely right that joy is always a surprise, a gift, God-created and aimed. Wordsworth was also right that joy’s wind-swept movement has about it something unhindered and generous. The Psalmist sings, “Shall the dead arise and praise thee?” (88:10). The answer, despite the psalm’s own sense of improbability, is an emphatic “Yes!” Boom! For it is among the dead that God creates anew. Boom! This very act, the act of bringing into being, and thus the being of “anything at all” is ever joyful. Boom, boom! “Even at the grave we make our song . . .” (1979 Book of Common Prayer).
The famous story of St. Francis’s discussion with Brother Leo regarding “perfect joy” was hardly the fare of Charles Trenet. Francis commends “suffering, injury, discomfort, and contempt” that rains upon us by the cruelty and misunderstanding of others. These afflictions, after all, are blessings, for they mark the experience of supreme joy as we are conformed to the Cross of Jesus. Elsewhere, Francis compares perfect obedience to the condition of a corpse, lifted and moved about by others without resistance. It all comes down, it seems, to an extreme passivity, joy in becoming like the beaten and dead Christ. That’s one way of reading Francis, and a fair way.
But there are other forms of “perfect joy.” One of them flows unhindered into the common current of joyful people of whatever ilk. Joy comes to those who are laid open to it, ready to receive it, like a sheet opened to the wind. St. Francis would not have commended some of Trenet’s life choices. But he would thrill with Trenet’s songs: “Je chante, je chante soir et matin / Je chante sur mon chemin” (I sing, I sing morning and night / I sing along my way); “Y a d’la joie /Bonjour bonjour les hirondelles / . . . Y a d’la joie / Partout y a d’la joie” (There is joy, / hello hello swallows / . . . There is joy everywhere, / there is joy). Both the sorrowful and the contented can be so blessed.
My advice: Leave joy alone. Forget the politics, the theories, even the theology. Let joy arise and spread its wings with its untethered soarings. Joy and the Holy Spirit are not quite equivalents. But for each, Paul’s exhortation is needed: Do not quench it (1 Thess. 5:19).
