L6: Mountains

We've got to get to the bottom of this, to the answer to the fleeting question, what is joy and how do we find it? Do we find it at all?

C.S. Lewis had his own definition, that joy was something we couldn't fully have in the here and now. That now and then, we caught glimpses of it and that was a picture of heaven. But it was not something we could truly know or make known deeply here on Earth. The joy that is from the Lord, that is, unspeakable and transcendent joy.

But there's something in the here and now, there's something we can have, something I know we have and have had. The question is where does it come from and how does it make itself manifest?

It is promised to us afterall, for we are always already raised up with Christ, or something like that, when Lacan and Paul meet in a hallway and start agreeing on more things than you'd ever believe.

But how can we know? Is it a sin to suffer and feel like God might not be as close as He is? I won't rush to claim it, because I've felt it.

And I've felt the reverse.

Somewhere we've got to allow for the acknowledgment that we don't really know how God works. What might be an unending unspeakable joy and faith in Christ for years on end could stem from the same theology that leads to years of struggles with faith.

I don't know if that's the case, but I do know that I can't claim surety either, because God draws and teaches us all differently. He made us differently. He made us care about different things, he made us love and experience love differently. And he did it because it is how he expresses himself through us, his children.

Sometimes faith is what you've got to cling to when the world is falling down, and sometimes it's the start of everything beautiful, and either way, we've got to get to a point where we can say neither is incorrect. Just different and all at once the same.

It might never make sense, until you leave the center.

-Zack

"The boundaries of language I quietly cursed
And all the different names for the same thing."
-Death Cab for Cutie