people in happy marriages talk this way: When I make love to her, I disappear.
The writer David Whyte makes the core point. “Joy,” he writes,
is the meeting place, of deep intentionality and self-forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but becomes a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.
The fourth layer of joy is spiritual joy. Sometimes joy comes not through movement, not through love, but from an unexpected contact with something that seems boundaryless, pure spirit. Joy comes with a sensation that, as the writer Jerry Root, citing C .S. Lewis, put it, all reality is iconoclastic—the world is enchanted by a mystical force.
One day, while he was living in Prague, the poet Christian Wiman was working in his kitchen when a falcon landed on the windowsill, about three feet from him. The bird scanned the trees below and the building across the street, but didn’t yet turn to look at Wiman. Wiman was transfixed. He called out to his girlfriend, who was in the bath, to come see, and she came out, dripping, and stood next to him, staring at the falcon. “Wish for something,” she whispered. Then the falcon turned its head and locked his eyes with Wiman’s, and Wiman felt some bottom fall out within him. He later wrote a poem about that moment, which includes this stanza:
For a long moment I’m still in
I wished and wished and wished
the moment would not end.
And just like that it vanished.
This kind of spiritual joy often involves mystical attunement. Tolstoy’s mother died when he was a young boy, and before the funeral he found himself in a room alone with her open casket. He climbed up on a chair to look down on her and experienced a strange peacefulness. “Somehow as I gazed, an irrepressible, incomprehensible power seemed to compel me,” he later wrote. “For a time I lost all sense of existence and experienced a kind of vague blissfulness which though grand and sweet, was also sad.” Then a man walked into the room and Tolstoy realized that the man might think him unfeeling if he wore a blissful look on his face, so to keep with social convention, he pretended to burst out crying. “This egotistic consciousness completely annulled any element of sincerity in my woe.”
We are climbing now, to higher and higher experiences of joy. The fifth layer of joy is transcendent joy, feeling at one with nature, the universe, or God. In Backpacking with the Saints, Belden Lane describes the experience of hiking this way:
Whenever I plunge into wilderness, my body and the environment move in and out of each other in an intimate pattern of exchange. I wade through water and inhale air filled with the scent of honeysuckle. I’m wrapped in cobwebs and pierced by briars. I swallow gnats drawn to the sweat on my body and feel the rocks on the trail through my boots. Where I “end” and everything else “begins” isn’t always clear. What seems to be “me” doesn’t stop at the fixed boundary of my skin.
Such transcendent moments can last only a few minutes, but they can alter a lifetime. People have a sense that they are seeing into the hidden reality of things, and afterward they can never go back and be content to watch pale shadows dancing on the wall of the cave. Ralph Waldo Emerson built a philosophy off such moments of transcendence. “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become the transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.”
This kind of joy is a delicious, if painful, longing. It starts with a taste of something eternal and then the joy consists of longing for that taste again. The joy, as C. S. Lewis put it, is not the satisfaction of the longing but the longing itself. Saint Augustine felt God’s love as a delicious and fervent hunger: “You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you lavished your