Joy

If you had told me, a year ago, of the nature of joy, I wouldn’t have believed it. Much less that I could hold such beauty in my possession. But then, it isn’t something I possess, it is something I am privileged to experience, and it would mean nothing without those frightened Freshman milling around the quad, or my fellow “Orientation Leaders” cheering me on as I climb thirty-five feet in the air. Whatever Joy is, celebrated to bad techno while ruining one’s shoes in the Carolina clay, or feeling the stress drain from one’s muscles while sitting in a half-empty church, it is something intoxicating. C.S. Lewis speaks of Joy as a longing, and I certainly know of what he means. I have felt it many times. But this is something new, something I felt hints of at my high-school Spring Formals, or while gazing over the mountain peaks with Lauren. This is the reality of myself, and the knowledge that I can participate in the self-discovery of those around me. 

I tell the Freshman that they make this school their own: without students a school is a shell, waiting to be claimed and transformed into a living organism. No two years are the same because there are always people leaving, people coming, but always there are the monks. Solidarity. Our drama of hormone-infested confusion takes on meaning in light of the black-clad figures wandering the campus. We are not the end-all-and-be-all. Our lives are brief, and they point toward something so much greater than the hope of a six-figure income. This is much easier to remember with the tolling of vespers and palsied wisdom of Father Arthur. 

No, this is joy. This is freedom. I defy Sartre and say that life owns an intolerable weight: the weight of cause and effect. And such life gives intolerable joy stemming from participation in a cause which promises Heavenly effect.