Flying Home
05.11.07 - 9:42 p.m.

...an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.

- C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy ('The First Years')

* * *

During my recent O and G exams, my neighbour (and Medical senior) Lydia burst into my room one night with the box set of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials in her outstretched hands, saying, "Take it! Take it from me!" She did not want to be distracted from studying for her posting, hahaha. So she left the books in my room. (Later, when Raj, who had lent them to her, heard about it, he said, "That was like leaving a timebomb in her room!")

Obviously, I started to read the books, O and G exams or no O and G exams. (I'd heard a great deal about them, especially from Faith, though I knew Philip Pullman primarily as the author who disliked C.S. Lewis and God and had written this series as an atheist counter to Narnia.) And the books were certainly good - very well-written, and written with perfect balance and timing and imagination (only I thought it a series more suitable for adults than children cos it's a bit scary for kids). In flavour it reminds me a lot of Joan Aiken's Dido series (especially Is Underground). But anyway.

When I was halfway through book One (The Golden Compass), I was moved by a sudden surge of emotion which was so strong that I just put the book down and cried. It had nothing to do with the events in the story... It was just that the book was so well-written from the child heroine's point of view - a girl of twelve, a child in a world of grown-ups - that I was overcome for a few seconds with the sensation of what it felt like to be a child once again.

* * *

Psyche. I have always - at least, ever since I can remember - had a kind of longing for death.

Orual. Ah, Psyche, have I made you so little happy as that?

Psyche. No, no, no. You don't understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine.. where you couldn't see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn't come, not yet, and I didn't know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.

- C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

The reason I have never liked to think about my childhood after 'escaping' from it is that - while externally happy, safe and secure, and blessed by loving parents - it was a time of such internal agony, confusion, and intense loneliness; the continuous struggle to understand and be reconciled with an imperfect world, to be ignored and misunderstood by grown-ups, the frustration of not being taken seriously, and above all, the intense longing for Reason and for Adventure and for Beauty, which seemed beyond anything this prosaic world had to offer, and which I thought could be found only in books. I longed, like Psyche in the passage quoted above, for something more than the world I could see... I was sure that there was.

There is something of the same feeling in the first song of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, when Belle looks wistfully into the distance and sings, "I want adventure in the great wide somewhere / I want it more than I can tell / And for once it might be grand / To have someone understand / I want so much more than they've got planned". C.S. Lewis (who felt it too) terms it Joy. And till I came to know God, and then later found out that He was the actual source of the Joy, I chased it all my life in books - first in adventure stories, then in poetry, particularly that of the Romantics. But sometimes I felt a black despair - was nobody looking for it but me? Weren't other people bothered by it? (I knew the poets were, which is why I spent such a lot of time reading them, but I didn't know if anyone that I knew in real life was...)

And there was always the unreasonable mystery of God, who to me was always a faceless, malignant entity whom I never knew for the God of Love until I was 16 years old. In childhood I always looked at God in the manner that Shelley looks at God in Prometheus Unbound (and which Philip Pullman himself does in His Dark Materials perhaps) mistaking Him as completely opposed to what He really stands for.

I have always remembered childhood as a very difficult time, full of struggle, a struggle to know What In The World Is Going On and What On Earth Am I Doing Here and What Is The Point Of Life that lasted till I finally found God at age 16 (haha, not that that 'ended' anything - that was only the beginning!). Above all as a time of great frustration. I have often shared with others that it seemed that my 'life' only began when I came to know God. And often I have tried to forget what came before, because I remember it as a time of darkness.

Even trying to forget about it was agony, because of certain decisions I made in order to leave childhood behind me and grow into what I became convicted was God's plan for my life - the need to let go of the old hypersensitivity to literature, the love for words and some of my old talents and ambitions for myself. When I was letting go of it I felt that I was murdering part of myself (see my old entry The Ethics of Forgetting). Although I have reconciled myself to all this, I still try not to think about childhood so as not to awaken memories of all these old struggles.

But suddenly while reading Philip Pullman's book, there was such a fierce stab of what it was like to be a child, a stab of all the old longing for Something More which characterised my childhood... The longing which is described so well in Till We Have Faces.

And in that moment I saw what I had never seen before: that my childhood was not just a time of darkness; it had also been studded with so many bright points of Joy. All those years of struggling with the question of whether God was real or not, the years of hating God, atheism, of 'putting God in the dock' and blaming Him for holding Himself so far out of reach ('how can you expect people to know You if You make it so hard for people to believe in You?') - even after I came to know God, I had not understood - why did He make the way so long and hard for me? - But when I had that feeling of childhood again, and remembered how it had been riddled with Joy - all that intense longing, so intense that it was nearly intolerable, the longing to the point of frustration, but Joy nonetheless - I saw that, truly, all my life God had been wooing me... And that I had been glimpsing Him all along, even when I felt furthest away from Him. What of Himself that He could extend to me even when I wanted nothing to do with Him, He had given me through the books which I loved. He had given me the clearest of signposting towards Him through these many flashes of Joy, so that I recognised Him when I finally found Him, though I thought I had never met Him before.

"Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? That was my country, the place where I should have been born. For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. Do you not see now...?"

- Psyche in Till We Have Faces

I cried because I had never seen before that He had allowed me to 'know' Him, in a sense, for years even before I knew Who He was. That He had wanted me all along, and given me help all the way, not held Himself completely invisible to me as I'd thought. In both Poetry and Reason He had been there. In Shelley and Keats, King Arthur, the French Revolution, in all those intense intellectual struggles... In Biggles, in The Saint... There had been Joy. And God was in all the Joy. And 'all that longing' - It had always counted for something! It had always counted!

And the words of Narnia came back into my head, when one of the children, who can never go back to Narnia, tearfully asks Aslan, "Will we ever see you again?" and the Lion goes, "Child, you will meet me again in your world, but under a different name...."

And so now I saw that I had known 'Aslan' all through my childhood... Only under a different name... I had been given this privilege. And now that childhood has faded, taking the anguished intensity of that season away with it, and also taking away some of the gifts which I once had but have chosen to relinquish, I have been granted the privilege of continued Joy, which however is less important to me now than its Source. I have lost my 'Narnia' (and how I used to mourn for it, the having to give up that intensity of feeling, although I knew life would be less painful without it!) but I see now that it was just a different season of my journey with God through this life, and that at every stage of life God will give me a new way of experiencing Him. It takes my breath away.

As C.S. Lewis says in Surprised by Joy, "I believe (if the thing were at all worth recording) that the old stab, the old bitter-sweet, 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 sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries 'Look!' The whole party gathers round 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."

* * *

I guess Philip Pullman probably envisioned his series as children's fiction with a rather anti-God slant (though what he actually attacks is blind religiosity and legalism, which God doesn't like either), in the manner of Prometheus Unbound (imagine Prometheus Unbound crossed with Good Omens heh, but minus the jokiness).. Yet it was while reading it that God touched me deeply with this new revelation of His love for me! Along with it comes such a deep sense of unworthiness... what am I that He should have pursued me right from the beginning of my life? And yet He did.

To have been wanted all my life by Someone, and prepared all my life to meet Him... What an overwhelming thought!