“It was not the original sight of if that brought him Joy but the remembrance of having seen it- a memory that overwhelmed him with “desire; but desire for what?” (Between Interpretation and Imagination: C.S. Lewis and the Bible by Leslie Baynes)
For Lewis, the experience of Joy as virtue and Joy as person were, if not synonymous, held together as a working metaphor for the other. In this particular quote the author is speaking about the way in which both things are held together by memory.
Our lives are memory.
Thus, as it was with Lewis, to think back today on an anniversary of 21 years of marriage is not to recover a single moment but to re-encounter that living, breathing memory of both Joy and Joy that continues to overwhelm.
It is not that I remember meeting the lovingly named Jennzie for the first time, athough it is true to say this still feels as vividly aware as it did all those years ago to find that face that captivated me and drew me across the room in a desperate attempt to know and discover the person to whom it belonged. It is that I remember experiencing that moment. I remember what it was to feel that moment when I first saw and was captured by the person who became my wife. That is what sustains the story that I get to continue tell of the one who broke in and changed my life.
What is equally true is the latter part of that quote. If this story of Joy brought Lewis to a greater awareness of that which he desires, it is through the person of Joy that he was brought closer to the Truth can hold both in necessary relationship. For Lewis the answer to what is Truth was that enigmatic word: Love. A Love he understood to be illuminated by his profound and sustained belief in the revealed Love that is God. An argument he would go on to make “from Desire,” an argument that has been having a kind of renaissance as of late. An argument that makes sense to me on days such as this where I am compelled to wonder even as I am overwhelmed by such things as beauty and grace, things we find only in relationship to the world we encounter. Things that get embodied in such a thing as “a marriage.” A lost language these days, and yet something that still sits at the core of what drives our Desire- the marriage of all things to Truth.
For me, celebrating this anniversary is a gratefulness for the one who continues to awaken that Desire for Love and Wonder and Truth.
The Stories of my Life 