With the world the way it is, that simple and sweet feeling under the sun is elusive and almost unnameable. What is it? Walk down any street in Moncton as the season turns and it comes to you: a fleeting moment of actual joy.
Keep walking, and it grows in your breast. If only we could bottle it. Is the suggestion that this should be the organizing principle buttressing Moncton’s economic and social development too naive, too radical?
‘Joy’ is one of those funny words in the English language. Often, people assume it is a permanent state of being – something to which we must aspire. Some link it, exclusively, to a theistic condition of thought. Consider, for example, this excerpt from 20th-Century scholar C.S. Lewis’ autobiography Surprised by Joy: Top of Form
“You must picture me alone. . .night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
He continued: “I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words ‘compelle intrare,’ compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
Nicely said, though I lean towards secular rather than scriptural salves. When U.S. President Donald Trump floods the Twitterverse with his absurd, xenophobic epistles, I go for long, meandering strolls.
Moments of joy: Listening, on my IPhone, to the Bare Naked Ladies and The Persuasions jam with complete, hopeful abandon; listening to anything by The Strumbellas; listening to Neil Young trill ‘Old Man’ now that he his just that guy; listening to Leonard Cohen’s last album, because, yes, I want it darker; listening to K.D. Lang sing ‘Hallelujah’.
Moments of joy: Watching, again on my IPhone, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie eviscerate establishment predicaments.
“Hugh: Underneath the bellied skies, where dust and rain find space to fall, to fall and lie and change again, without a care or mind at all for art and life and things above; in that, there, look just there. No right, left, up, down, past, or future, we have but ourselves to fear.
“Stephen: Hugh, you chose that poem; for God’s sake why?
“Hugh: I chose it for a number of reasons.
“Stephen: I see, the most important one being?
“Hugh: because it was short.”
Time is, indeed, short. But, somehow, it gets deliciously longer when we begin to rebuild the world one community’s brick at a time. That simple and sweet feeling under the sun – as often fleeting as it might be – is ours to recognize and embrace.
Here, as I stroll, Moncton wants to rebuild its downtown even as it strives to welcome newcomers from strife-riddled parts of the world. Keep trying.
Joy is just around the corner.
The Bruce Scribes 