Surprised by Joy

That's cool.

And obviously Joy represents many, many different things, you know, which of course she is a person, but there is the idea of joy itself as this kind of, I try to piece it together from kind of St. Augustine and from C.S. Lewis based on his memoir, Surprised By Joy.

But I won't say too much about that.

Let readers kind of read and decide for themself.

Yes.

My hope is we're going to be finishing the Ransom Trilogy next season, then we're doing Surprised by Joy, because we've put off his autobiography for too

long.

And

expert

reader

and that was actually why i stumbled on it over stumbled through it and gave up when i first tried surprised by joy that was the first book of lewis's i read as an adult i had only read nani up to that point

oh wow

This is why Jesus says, no man comes unto me except the Father draw him.

C.S. Lewis in his Surprised by Joy has said, the day that I was converted, I was dragged kicking and screaming into the kingdom of God.

There was no more reluctant convert in England.

And some of us might be able to relate to that and recognize that when the power of God began to lay hold of us, it was rather for Paul like what he was doing to these prisoners as he dragged them through the streets.

Sometimes I worry that I am... redundant or that I repeat myself.

So when I think of joy, the first thing I latch onto is C.S. Lewis and a story of his life called Surprised by Joy.

He and his fellow inklings use the word joy in almost a kind of a technical, almost like a term of art, not unlike, Judy, what you're talking about, that sort of deep reservoir of joy that's coming up from within, as opposed to that sort of very temporal or passing phase if you want to call it that of of the of feeling happiness right so that the joy is definitely linked up with gratitude in from the c.s lewis formulation of course coming from a particular faith tradition and orientation but to look more broad into to build on that it's really more of that inner sense of groundedness connectedness and uh you know it's all about layers right so what's sort of in that inner core um and i think we discussed this last time that that you can have yes the ceiling is crumbling uh faucets leaking your heart might be linking uh but even in those moments uh where there's a lot of leakiness and stuff falling around and things are crumbling even in those moments, you can see or experience or feel welling up in you that sense of joy.

And when you do, of course, that is a gift.