I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.
– C.S. Lewis

One of the best questions anyone ever asked me was this one: “what are you looking forward to?” This person and I were sitting by a local playground, passing time while watching our kids play, and she meant it in the least philosophical and most prosaic sense (her answer: the next episode of Game of Thrones). I don’t remember what I said. But I often think back on that question because it captures something essential for life, at least for me: I need something to look forward to. The next trip. A package that will be arriving in the mail. An upcoming book or movie release. The perfect new outfit or accessory.

The interesting thing is that the answer to that question is always different, isn’t it? Can you imagine someone saying, “I read the perfect book; the best book I’ve ever read, and now I don’t need to read any other book ever again.” Neither would an amazing meal preclude the need to eat again—we are by nature and biology always looking for more, sometimes numbingly so (how many hours have we wasted searching for the next show or movie to stream, or the next thing to buy?). 

In fact, there is an inconsolable nature to my longing that is inevitable. I know from past experience that the yarn I ordered is more perfect in imagined heft and hue than it will probably be on actual arrival; that my dreams of feeling the strands knit up in my fingers is more pleasurable than the actual labor of doing so. The romantic tension in a novel is more inexorably mesmerizing than its consummation; the idea of being in love more alluring than the actual realities of love. How we picture our trip as we scroll through photos of our destination is often more delightful than the realities of travel. We have probably all had dreams where we piled our plates full of delicious dishes at a buffet banquet, only to wake up before eating any of it. 

But here is the other thing: I think what I crave is the anticipation itself, as much as or even more than the anticipated object—that sense of transcendent excitement, that little pocket of happiness my thoughts can drift back to, that feeling that there is something good or beautiful or enjoyable that is able to lift me outside of myself and the drudgeries of life.

The trouble is, I cannot find these pockets of transcendent happiness directly; it only comes as a side product of desiring or experiencing something else. And so I am always looking, looking for something to desire partly that I might have the desire itself.

C.S. Lewis wrote about this. He calls this feeling Joy. In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, he describes it as the experience “of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Lewis describes, for example, his discovery of the distinction between pleasure and joy when it came to sex: 

I repeatedly followed that path—to the end. And at the end one found pleasure; which immediately resulted in the discovery that pleasure (whether that pleasure or any other) was not what you had been looking for . . . One had caught the wrong quarry. You might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of . . . Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.

Pleasures are within our power; Joy is not. We substitute one for the other because it is in our power to do so; yet the one does not ever entirely satisfy our longing for the other. Why do we feel so often disappointed by the things we look forward to? Why does that knitting project, that romantic relationship, that vacation trip, not always entirely live up to our hopes? These pleasures betray us because they are meant on some level not to permanently satisfy, but to continually reveal, our longings. They pull back the curtain on the great truth that we are made for something more. When the atheistic Lewis came to realize this, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “We really can have forgiveness and eternal life in the presence of the One to whom all the Joy was pointing.”

How does believing in Jesus change our experience of longing and disappointment? Lewis reflects on this later on in the book:

I believe . . . that the old stab, the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life whatever. But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods the site of the signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, “Look!” The whole party gathers around and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold. “We would be at Jerusalem.” 

Being a Christian does not mean you never experience disappointment: it means you handle disappointment differently. Disappointment is not merely something to be immediately supplanted with some new object of longing. It is, rather, a space we can inhabit, because it carries new meaning. When you see a sign along a forest path, it is a good thing. It means you’re heading in the right direction. It’s a pointer of what’s to come. You might look forward to seeing the next sign, particularly if it’s a very long path. But you don’t expect the sign to be the destination. It’s not the end-all-be-all. You certainly wouldn’t sit down under the sign and worship it to the point where you can’t see beyond it at all.

Both the things we look forward to, and our longing for them, are signs. We can savor them, yet not be crushed by their evanescence. We can appreciate the delight—is it not a wonderful thing, to have something to look forward to?—yet understand that it is not the ultimate end. We can see in them hints and promises of our final destination, glimpses of the nature and glory of God himself. And slowly, this allows disappointment to refresh and refine our hopes, rather than crush them. We discover that there is something in the flavor of the joy itself that is enhanced by knowing to what and whom it points, however elusive it may be.