There is, first, a kind of naivete —a not knowing innocence. Looking back on moments of naivete we often lend to them a happiness they did not actually possess, charged with nostalgia and sentimentality: “oh those were the good ole days when things were good” we say. And when we say this we imply a moment when things stopped being happy. The “when things were good” is followed by a “before [insert event] happened.”
We suffer and we see things in a new way. Our eyes are opened.
I find increasingly that for us moderns this opening of eyes is attended to with a kind of despairing vanity. We not only believe that we see more of life, but that we see through it. “Ah, I see it all now,” is how we feel “I see through the sham.” We grin grimly, for while we are glad to not be duped anymore, there is a sadness. We moderns believe that joy is the price tag of our ability to say “They’re not taking me in again! I’m nobody’s fool!”
We have become, once again, like our first parents: the fruit whose sweetness opened our eyes robbed the sweetness of the world from us.
We believe that while on the surface of life things are sweet and bright and folks can be happy, the inner core of the world, the hard reality under the think crust of delight, is hard, cruel, and empty, and those who inhabit it are only out to get you.
C.S. Lewis’ character Dr. Weston summarizes this view succinctly: “Picture the universe as in infinite globe with this very thin crust on the outside. [...] all our lives we are sinking through it. When we've got all the way through then we are what's called Dead."
On that inside, at the heart of the world, Weston claims, is only “darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, stink.”
But this is not true. This layer, the one of sorrow, is like the first layer of happiness, it is immature and only interstitial. Suffering is real but it is not ultimate. It is not the Center.
So if the bright and sunny “blue-pill” life of blissful naivete is one kind of not-yet-fully-knowing-things-as-they-are, so too the realm of sorrow and disappointment, of coming-to-grips-with and taking-long-hard-looks-at-oneself, is not yet the full picture.
Joy is what lies at the heart of the world —not in spite of life’s sorrows but concluding them and fulfilling them.
It was, after all, for the joy that was set before Him that Christ took up his cross and went to rejection and execution and extinction and the grave. He went, in fact, down into Weston’s “darkness, worms, heath, pressure, suffocation, stink.” And, we must be clear about this, his rising again was far more a rising beyond. It was on a whole different from Lazarus’ resuscitated life, it was something altogether on the other side of sorrow. The joy our Master entered into on the 8th day is the Real full-spectrum view of Things.
It is not a blind happiness. It is a ponderous merriment funded by dolorous wounds.
The martyr does not stand at the executioner’s block and say “This is it” but rather “This too shall pass.”