Joy is dangerous.
Flannery O’Connor understood this. A Southern Catholic novelist, O’Connor gained renown as one of the most compelling American storytellers of the 20th century. His fiction exudes with realism and the struggle for meaning and joy. O’Connor, like his contemporaries Dorothy Sayers, Graham Greene, and CS Lewis, criticized the militant secularism of the 20th century and spoke of life in the quagmire of literary culture’s despondency.
In a famous letter to her friend Betty Hester, O’Connor defended the moral imperatives of Christianity, arguing that they were not tools of slavery but weapons of joy. She writes:
A lesser good is always given up for a greater one; the opposite is what sin is. . . . or that you call my fight to submit not a fight to submit but a fight to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. Picture me gritting my teeth stalking joy, fully armed as well, as this is a very dangerous quest.
You always give up a lesser good for a greater one. O’Connor might as well have been presciently paraphrasing Jim Elliot: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Most likely, his imagination was captured by the apostle Paul, who considered everything he had earned in a life of privilege and distinction “rubbish” compared to the “exceeding value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3). :8–9).
What O’Connor, Paul, and Jim Elliot meant is that the struggle in our souls is not the struggle of wanting to be happy. We are born with that desire and we die with it (even in suicide). the fight is watch the true value of everything, and seeing it, surrender ourselves headfirst to what is supremely worthy and satisfying: God.
But that is dangerous.
Hunting is hard work
O’Connor’s verbal image in this paragraph is striking. She imagines that the pursuit of joy in Christ is like a long, heated hunt for a game animal, a creature that can lead her stalker into hostile territory. No deer will willingly jump into the arms of the hunter. The hunter’s desire is the male, but that desire will not be satisfied arbitrarily or accidentally. Thus he stalks and stalks and stalks: waiting, sitting, crouching, stepping on thorns and thistles for a chance to get close to his prey. He is exhausting, dirty and risky.
Is hunting really an accurate description of seeking joy in God? I think so. Part of the reason it may not seem accurate is that when modern people hear God commanding us to be happy in him, we interpret it as a command to do what is easy and passive because we instinctively think of happiness that way. . Alternatively, we fear being unhappy, and by “unhappy” we often mean a life of struggle, danger, or suffering. But these conceptions are wrong. Happiness is not a semi-conscious inertia.
A few years ago, I saw a government-sponsored advertisement on birth control from England. On one side of the ad was a picture of a video game controller and on the other side was a lollipop. The ad asked its readers, “Would you want to give this up for this?” It was an effective advertisement, not because it communicated the truth (quite the contrary), but because it got to the point. “Your happiness is at stake here,” the ad whispers. “Hours of games and freedom and sex without commitment are the secrets of happiness, and that will end if you have a child.” In other words, you don’t have to stalk joy. Eat, drink, be happy and joy will come to you.
Very expensive search
But passivity will not produce delight in God, as the saints in the Bible show us.
Consider Moses, who “rather be ill-treated with the people of God than enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin” because he “regarded the reproach of Christ as greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, because he set his sights on the reward” (Heb. 11:25–26).
Think of Jeremiah, who lurked in joy even when everything around him stank of death and abandonment: “He has ground my teeth on the gravel, and made me shrink to ashes; my soul is deprived of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is. . . . But this I remember, and this is why I have hope: The constant love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never end; they are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:16–17, 21–23).
Consider Paul, who lost almost every earthly privilege and pleasure he had and in the end said that a life of pain and suffering and danger was nothing compared to the “supreme value” of “gaining Christ and being found in God.” him” (Philippians 3:8–9).
And consider Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame” (Hebrews 12:2).
Jesus, Paul, and Jeremiah were not closing their eyes or watching sitcoms or scrolling through Instagram to help themselves forget the danger and suffering in front of them. His were pursuits of joy at all costs. And his searches were costly and dangerous, and they paid off.
Where the fair stalk begins
So how do we stalk joy? He must begin by believing in the good news from God: that though we are sinful, selfish, and broken people, Christ has considered our helpless state and has taken our sin upon himself. Believing in the justifying power of the gospel is essential to stalking joy. Unless we are convinced that God is really for us and not against us, our souls will drift over and over again to the trifles of the world that distract us. In many cases, the worst enemy of lasting joy is not sadness but distraction.
Screwtape knew it. In a letter to his nephew and subordinate, Wormwood, Screwtape exhorts the lesser demon to attack his “patient” with “a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt.” Unlike true repentance, this “subtle restlessness” will keep him perpetually unwilling to approach anything with the scent of God, and therefore he will be ruthlessly at the mercy of the devil to distract him.
As this condition becomes more fully established, you will gradually free yourself from the tiresome task of providing pleasures as temptations. . . . You no longer need a good book, which he likes very much, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his dream; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s newspaper will suffice. You can make him waste his time. . . . You can make it do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him awake late into the night, not making a fuss, but looking at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy, outgoing activities we want you to avoid can be inhibited and any in return, so that I can finally say, as one of my own patients said upon arrival here, “Now I see that I spent most of my life doing neither what should neither what I liked”. (The Screwtape Letters58–59)
The greatest threat to joy
For me and millions of Western Christians, the greatest single threat to the lurking of joy is not crushing despair or ravenous carnal hedonism, but a middling spirituality that adds Christian jargon to an emotionally comatose existence, wasting hours on social media nonsense and Netflix while congratulating yourself on avoiding the “great” sin.
But stalking joy is radically different. Stalking joy means doing whatever it takes to be content in God and in love for others. It means tired hands that open the Psalms at midnight after a tiring day’s work. It means making that phone call you’ve been dreading to a trusted friend for prayer and accountability. It means getting up earlier on Sunday to serve in the nursery. It means having godly ambition.
Stalking joy is overcoming the hypnotic consumerism of modern life. It’s not safe, and it’s not easy. As Flannery O’Connor reminded us, it is a search, and very dangerous. He is also the only one who resonates with the glory of God in eternity.