Surprised by Joy

You just saw this from Psyche where it's a sweetness that hurts.

And this is something you see in Lewis's autobiography, Surprised by Joy.

Sehnsucht is arguably the theme of Surprised by Joy.

It's really what he means by the word joy.

In chapter one, he notes that he's using this word joy in a technical sense, and he describes it as an unsatisfied desire, which itself is more desirable than any satisfaction.

I love the fact that a mere book title can do that for him.

I completely get that.

In Surprised by Joy, he gives a couple of examples of particular experiences he had that draw this up.

It was a royal battle going on.

In his own testimony entitled, Surprised by Joy, he says it in so many interesting and quaint ways.

For example, the great angler played his fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue.

I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt.

It's...

I, I recommend the film, I've said it before, The Most Reluctant Convert, to see a depiction of that, and it's also in the, in the book Surprised by Joy.

Mm.

Um, and this guy, McPhee, based on Kirkpatrick, yeah, he's very s- skeptical, so he's saying, "Why? Why? What are we doing?" Because it's about faith.

in Lewis' world, which it's always the same type of people.

It's in Experiment House in the, in Narnia, in, um, The Silver Chair, I think, isn't it? And then it's, um, it- you know, it's nice here.

It's the progressive element earlier in the book.

It's always that same type of mindset that Lewis really despises.

But more often than not, I think the divine voice is a symbol of this experience when the more, the greater, breaks through.

You know who I love on this point is C.S. Lewis, um, his book, Surprised by Joy.

You know, a-and by joy, he means something very specific, not ordinary good feeling.

Joy is this weird longing that we experience sometimes at the limit of life for something we can't really see, but we intuit it in this absolutely beguiling way.

C.S. Lewis, great man of the faith, but before he started writing about Jesus, he was an atheist.

And he writes about his conversion from atheism to Christianity in his wonderful book, Surprised By Joy.

I encourage you to look at it.

It's, uh, basically a biography of his life.

We're talking a little bit about C.S. Lewis.

C.S. Lewis would say in his autobiography of sorts, right, his Surprised by Joy, he mentions that when he read George MacDonald's Fantasties, it baptized his imagination.

I think it was a young boy when he was about like 17 or 16.

But then it was later in his 20s, and I think it was 1926, was that when Everlasting Man came out? 25, yes.

I think...

I don't know that I've really ever answered this question before, but it's been in my mind ever since I read Surprised By Joy.

Mm-hmm.

How would I frame up my own story? What is my story about? I had a wonderful conversation with Andrew Peterson-

Mm-hmm

... uh, in Oxford, um, about, uh, about, uh, Till We Have Faces, but one of the things I wanna do after I finish my scholarly work on Till We Have Faces, Orwell is telling her own story in that book, and I've been fascinated recently by our stories.

And so, uh, one of the things that when I read Surprised By Joy, I thought, "How would I frame, how would I tell, what is the sh..." He calls it the shape of my early life.

Well, you have to have some distance, and frankly, a few years in order to stand back enough to see where my life, how my life has been shaped.