A kaleidoscope of joy

There are moments in life – profoundly ordinary and yet captivatingly beautiful moments – when all my senses are engaged. They converge into a kaleidoscope of things intangible, but exquisite; immanent, but somehow just beyond reach.

It’s that walk in the woods, for instance, when last year’s leaves softly squish under each footstep. Ferns and flowers poke through the composting soil. Dappled sunlight filters through the emerging foliage above, while a breeze ruffles the tree tops. I’m completely immersed in the here and now, but insatiably conscious of something beyond what I can hear, see or touch. There’s more. It’s here. I know it.

Surely it’s something like what C.S. Lewis described as he was “surprised by joy” in his journey from atheism to faith. He struggled to find the words to adequately explain it. (No wonder I’m having a hard time.) He wrote about “stabs of joy,” being “distinct not only from pleasure in general, but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.” Yes, that’s it!

A divine echo

The Germans, with their penchant for stringing words together, call it Sehnsucht. Roughly translated it would be “longing-addiction.” Psychologists have adopted the term to refer to a sense of incompleteness, yearning or craving. It’s what I feel when I look at a sapphire sky above that seems deep enough to swallow me whole. I’m filled with joy, but there’s an undeniable ache in my soul to see the invisible. I long to touch the hand beyond the blue. Suddenly, although surrounded by beauty, I’m homesick for a place I’ve never seen.

It’s not something I can muster, orchestrate or even grasp. It comes from beyond me but resonates intensely within me. It has to be deep calling to deep, doesn’t it? A divine echo of sorts, a heavenly embrace.

A mysterious sense

Recently, I read Helen Keller’s story again. Deprived of both sight and hearing, I wonder if she lived with an enhanced awareness of things beyond the physical world. What else would explain an incident that happened in a cemetery when she was just a young girl? Having never been told anything about death or burial, Helen went to a graveyard with her mother and her teacher, Anne Sullivan, to look at some flowers. Upon entering the area, she immediately placed her hands on the women’s eyes and repeatedly spelled “cry cry.” Her own eyes filled with tears. She perceived grief she had not personally known.

How was it that she often sensed her brother’s presence while he was still at a distance, and when she couldn’t see or hear him? How did she correctly identify people she met as she walked through town, before having been told of their approach?

Sightless eyes and deaf ears couldn’t dampen Helen’s keen sense of God’s presence and power. She described joy as the “holy fire that keeps a person’s purpose warm and their intelligence aglow.” Long before she knew God’s name or could articulate her faith, she knew he was with her, “a great river of light, higher than the stars and deeper than silence.”

We should all have such acute vision, viewing this life through a kaleidoscope of tenacious joy, eagerly anticipating the day we get to meet our Creator. No longer outside looking in, but face to face. Finally!