Happiness And Peace

These words come from Mere Christianity, which grew out of talks Lewis gave on BBC radio during the war years of the early 1940s. He was not lecturing a seminar. He was speaking plainly to anxious people about what actually holds when everything else is shaking.

What gives the line its weight is where Lewis was speaking from. He had spent his early adult years as a settled atheist, a sharp young academic who, by his own later account in Surprised by Joy, described himself as one of the most dejected and reluctant converts in England. So when he says God cannot give us happiness apart from himself, this is not a man who arrived at faith easily and now tidies up everyone else’s doubts. He had tested the alternatives at length, with a serious mind, and found them wanting. That is why I read this less as a rule being handed down and more as a report from someone who went looking in all the obvious places and came back to tell us what is not there. The conviction was earned before it was written.

Read the sentence slowly and notice how bare it is. He could easily have softened it. He might have said happiness apart from God is harder to keep, or thinner than it looks, or quick to fade. Instead he says it is not there, and then, as if to stop us reaching for a gentler reading, he says it again: there is no such thing.

That second sentence is not padding. It shifts the claim from a matter of taste to a matter of fact. Lewis is not telling me God frowns on my looking for joy elsewhere. He is telling me the particular joy I am after, the deep and settled kind that finally stays put, is genuinely absent from those other places. I had always heard this sort of thing as a warning. Heard properly, it is closer to a relief. If the problem were that God was holding out on me, I would have to find a way to talk him round. If the problem is simply that the thing I want is not stocked where I keep searching, then I can stop wearing myself out in the wrong aisles and turn round.

Lewis is leaning on something Scripture takes for granted from its first pages: that the human being is God’s creature, shaped and given breath by him (Genesis 2:7), and so never runs true on anything smaller than God. Paul makes the same point to the philosophers in Athens, that it is in God that we live and move and exist (Acts 17:28). We were not built to be self-supplying. We never were.

The verse this quote echoes, Psalm 16:11, says it in the warmer language of delight, locating fullness of joy in God’s own presence. Notice the word the psalm reaches for. Not a portion of joy or a reasonable share of it, but fullness. That is the very thing Lewis insists cannot be had on the side. And the New Testament makes it more personal still: in John 15:11 Jesus tells his friends he has spoken to them so that their joy may be complete. The happiness in question turns out not to be a commodity God distributes from a distance. It is bound up with God himself, offered to us in Christ.

I believe this most clearly at the disappointing moments rather than the triumphant ones. A holiday I had counted on for months, a piece of work finally finished, a long-awaited bit of good news: often a day or two later there is a quiet flatness I did not expect. The thing itself was good. It simply could not carry the load I had silently asked it to bear. For a long time I read that flatness as something wrong with me, or with the thing, and set off to find a better one.

What has changed is that I now take the let-down as a message rather than a mistake. The restlessness is not evidence that I chose the wrong job or the wrong holiday. It is the longing doing precisely what it was made to do, pointing past every good gift to the Giver.

So I try to do one small, unspectacular thing with it. Before I reach for the next replacement, I stop and turn the wanting Godward in prayer. Nothing elaborate. Just admitting, honestly, where I have been looking, and asking the One who actually holds what I am after.

• Where have I quietly asked a good thing, a job, a relationship, a long-laid plan, to give me a peace it was never built to give?
• When the familiar restlessness returns, do I treat it as a fault to be fixed, or let it point me home?
• If lasting joy is genuinely kept in one Person and freely offered, what is one honest step I could take towards him this week instead of towards the next substitute?

If you would like to stay with this a little longer, you could read more of C.S. Lewis’s words or sit with what Scripture itself says across our Bible verses about pages.