Full with Desire, Empty of Delight

In my last post, I listed a number of C.S. Lewis quotes on 'joy', noting the presence of deep, inconsolable longing as a large part of his definition. As well, there must be a present, if transient, enjoyment and delight in the moment itself. Thus, while my Greek lexicon defines 'chara' as the experience of gladness, I would submit that an equally appropriate definition would be the desire for delight.

Over the last week, I've run about 40 miles (and a lot more in my head!) while contemplating why my relationship with Sarah fell apart, how I'm supposed to respond to my birth mother, where God is leading me next year and in the years to come, and both attitudes and behaviors that need to change in my life. I believe a lot of this centers on joy. Contentment has never come easily to me. With greater and greater clarity, God has been voicing a truth to me that now seems obvious.

I am always consumed by desire, but rarely filled with delight.

One of my clearest memories came but a few weeks ago. As I boarded a plane to return to America, I felt the all too common mixture of dread and eager expectation. Since the day I knew I would be traveling to Korea, every morning had begun in this conflicted manner. A part of my soul yearned for time to be cut short, that I might arrive in Korea sooner. But another part hoped I would wake up in a different world, where such a voyage would not be necessary. This part of my soul realized that my ache for the quick passage of time was founded upon my inability to concentrate on anything in the present more than a true desire to return to Korea and meet my birth family.

It was a bit strange, then, that I felt this same dread and expectation on my trip back to America. For weeks, my thoughts had been focused on the trip to Korea, not the return to the United States. But suddenly, all of the thoughts I had experienced about Korea reversed themselves: "How will my birth family in Korea receive me?" turned into "How will my friends and family at home receive me?" How radically had a week in Korea changed me? Would others detect this change, perhaps even before I could? Would my heart feel at rest, at home?

(Yes, I will connect this rather biographical post with my musings about joy and desire and delight at some point. But people are very curious about my trip to Korea, so this is a good way to tackle my personal experiences and my theological musings at the same time. My apologies to those of you who are only interested in one or the other.)

The height of my emotional exhaustion occurred at a rather surprising point in the flight. A few hours after taking off, the flight attendants began passing out our first meal. A tray of Korean food was placed in front of me. Amidst the cramped, poorly lit, dismally stale airplane, there appeared the perfect image of Korean aesthetic and simplicity. Each vegetable was precisely aligned, the kimchi cut in a perfect rectangle, the colors of the meal arrayed with careful attention to the ying and yang. Every object on the tray sang out in unison, praising the Korean ideals of balance and poise.

The purity of this experience, stirred in with my realization of it being the last truly Korean memory I would have for years, served as the final emotional pull to unwind my heart. In this horrendously crowded but unavoidably impersonal airplane, I began to cry, then sob, then weep. While I've developed the tendency to tense up and shed a lone tear rather often, I am not one to weep. And if I do, it is not in public. But for one of the first times in my adolescent/adult years, I no longer had control. Looking back, I feel a great deal of pity for the stewardesses, who flurried about and tried to help me, but could not speak enough English to know what was wrong. I clumsily handed them my tray of uneaten food and buried my face in shame and embarrassment; for a Korean man to cry in public both shocked and discomfited those who could hear me, and I could tell. My ineptitude at being a Korean was complete.

After regaining my composure, I decided to wash my face in the bathroom. Making my way aft, I stopped for a moment at a rear window. The cabin had been darkened at this point, but strange, thick shafts of blue light pried their way into the last few rows of the airplane. Moments before I pressed my face against one of the rear windows, I cast a quick look about me, fully expecting every pair of eyes in the airplane to be focused on me. Instead, I saw a man awkwardly sprawled out on two seats, attempting to sleep for a few hours. Several women sat next to each other, eyes glazed over and drawn into the small screens on the seats in front of them. In Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, English, Vietnamese, the headphones and subtitles blared forth their polyphonous cacophony of silent noise.

My eyes fluttered back to the window. It took me several moments to recognize what I was seeing. Tens of thousands of feet above the earth, traveling at hundreds of miles per hour in a lone airplane, I experienced for the first time the suspension of time I have always desired. Far to the west, at the edge of my periphery, a slivered moon glowed with a searing but hollow intensity, as if God had etched a small carving into the firmament and let the pure white burn of His glory shine through. As my eyes moved east, the deep void surrounding the moon tempered bit by bit. Like the temple curtain, torn in two at the moment of Christ's death, the horizon to the far east ripped apart at the seams, revealing clouds that burst forth with the power of the burning blind of the sun.

Were this all my eyes were beholden to see, I would still count myself as one man in a billion. How many men in ages past would have given all of their possessions for this one moment? It seemed as a myth to me, a story in which my youth or the love of my life or my soul itself would be demanded as payment for the magic of being simultaneously blinded by the sunrise and chilled by the cold of the darkest of nights.

But quite astonishingly, the painting was not yet complete. My eyes dropped below the horizon into a sea of churning motion. Beneath me lay the Aleutian volcanoes and mountains, dancing in and out of the cover of clouds and mist. Occasionally, the bright greens or blues of a lake or the stark white of a glacier would emerge from the sweeping, reckless mess of snow and stone below me. The perfect stillness of the sun, moon and sky above the horizon accented the swirl of the landscape below the horizon. The sheer, sharp dark of the west stood in stark contrast to the burning haze of the east. I sat, entranced, for nearly an hour. At any moment, I expected the scene to disappear forever. After this seemingly eternal span of time, a disturbance did indeed divert my focus. Many dozens of miles away, a pinpoint of light appeared, nestled among the mountains. Even as the light grew stronger, it diffused so quickly that I could not identify its source. But as I began to see not one but many burning lights, it dawned upon me that I was watching the sleeping city of Juneau.

I often prefer the potency of words when I try to communicate an idea or memory or emotion to another. But here, they completely fail me. The beauty was overwhelmingly ineffable. These sentences must be read in order, one at a time, but the image I just described assaulted me in a single sustained moment. For once in my life, I felt the joy C.S. Lewis describes. My heart burnt with desires of every sort. I desired to be with Sarah, that we might share this moment together. To a lesser degree, I desired to be with anyone or everyone, that all might see the extent of God's beauty. But at the same time, there was the deep desire I have spoken of in many entries over the years; the desire for the fullness of beauty, a desire for the day to come, when joy will be complete. Yet these desires came as no surprise to my heart, though their extent was stronger in this instant than few others in my life. Instead, the surprise came in the unavoidable delight my heart felt in the moment.

Why have I always been a man, driven from one place to another, unsettled and relentless in my pursuit of pursuit itself? A portion of this is universal to all man; we were not created for this world as it stands, and shall never find our satisfaction here. But I believe a great deal of my restlessness also has to do with a fundamental imbalance in the way I typically experience life. Those who know me best also know that I often have a vacant look in my eyes, as though dispossessed (or perhaps possessed). The strength of my desires and the weakness of my delight causes me to withdraw from this world and its joys. Again, words begin to fail me.

Today, I turned twenty-two. Much to my dismay, in many ways. I've always hated my own birthday (probably because it's supposed to be a time of delight, and I've realized how poor I am in delighting!), and this year seemed in many ways the hardest of all, because my heart is in so many different places at once, and I seem to be without the emotional strength or stamina to find an abundance of joy in my current circumstances.

That our joy might be complete, Jesus Christ must be the 'joy of man's desiring', but equally the joy of man's delight. I have often believed I lacked a full joy because my desires were misdirected. While this is undoubtedly the case in many circumstances, I am now beginning to realize that even in those rare moments when my desires are properly focused, I continue to lack joy because I fail to delight in the here and the now. I also realize I have failed to appreciate many around me, or seemed to lack an appreciation for the very same reason. Rather than delighting in my fellowship with someone, I'm too occupied with my desires and what could be or what might very well be in the next life. But too much desire draws me away from this world and the people in it. So I apologize for the distance I have forced between myself and everyone I know, and have begun to embark upon a new journey wherein I might continue to be consumed by desire, but also be filled to overflowing with delight. For much too long, I have felt solely the pang of joy, the inconsolable longing of joy, and the sorrow of joy. I pray now, because I am driven to desperation, that I might also know the comfort of joy, the peace of joy, and the delight of joy.