Chapter 4: The End of the Quest: The Joy of Heaven

Joy is unchangeable. Pleasure and happiness have nothing of that air of eternity about them that joy does. Yet the joy in our spirit does not stay there, bottled up and stagnant. Spirit is essentially dynamic, and its joy flows out in three directions: back to God in gratitude and rejoicing, out to others like a watering fountain, and into our own soul and body as a sort of overspill. Joyful feelings and thought, even pleasure and health, result from joy; and this is a foretaste of heaven. (p. 134) The home of joy is God, (p. 135). But joy has no imaginable finite opposite for joy is of itself infinite, p. 135. Joy is more than self-sufficient, bursting out of itself and calling for rejoicing. True praise is our response not to what happens to turn us on subjectively but to what is objectively good in itself, intrinsically valuable, worthy of praise, (p. 137). Perhaps one reason excitements like gambling, violence, alcohol, and promiscuity are often temptations to the ethical and conventionally religious person is that his or her life is full of peace but not joy. It lacks the ingredient that is in hoy but not in peace or happiness; passion. Such a person is rarely tempted by avarice, selfishness, or lust for power, the disire to control ones life, (p. 141). And if we do not find it where it is-in a loved love relationship with god-we will likely try to find it wher it isn’t- in the world, (p. 142). It may be even unhappy, like repentance, or painful, like childbirth, (p. 144). Our deepest destiny is death, not just of the body, but of the ego. We are not just to imitate Christ but to “put on Christ,” to “be in Christ”, to “share the divine nature, (p. 151). This heavenly secret of self-forgetfulness is the secret of joy on earth as well as in heaven. All joy is un-self-conscious; self-consciousness spoils joy. To stop and turn to see how you’re doing spoils whatever you’re doing, whether it’s bad or good; lusting, resenting, fighting, singing, bowling, loving (physically or spiritually), or sharing the divine nature, (p. 153). But we also forget joy, for joy points beyond to its object, to God, (p. 155). Thy will be done is the infallible road to joy, (p. 158).

But God keeps kissing frogs, dispensing joy like rain, patiently teaching us to play his music, to learn the heavenly harmony of wills, training us for our perfect parts in the music of the spheres for which we were created. We desire many things, and he offers us only one thing. He can offer us only one thing-Himself. He has nothing else to give, (p. 158). God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from himself because it is not there. There is not such thing, (p. 159). If it is true, then God’s single gift for all our desires is his Son, (p. 159). To have joy, you must fertilize the root of joy, and the hourly fertilizer is obedience. Pick up a straw (or a messy room) for the love of go. And then you will experience heaven on earth. It is scandalously simple: Trust and obey for there is no other way, (p. 161).