In the final pages of ‘The Remarkable Ordinary’, Buechner turns to consider joy.
“And, of course, one of the things we must listen for is joy.
“It's hard to talk about joy for the almost superstitious reason that you might take the bloom off it, you'll quit, you'll threaten it, you fear it will come to an end when the demons come and gobble it up. But almost in spite of ourselves we get glimpses of joy, and maybe glimpses is all we can ever have of joy. There's a wonderful phrase of Tolkien's in an essay he wrote on fairy tales where he speaks of ‘Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief,’ which you glimpse in fairy tales during what he calls the ‘sudden joyous “turn” - where the frog turns out to be a prince, where the straw is spun into the gold, or the funny little man turns out to be the king, or whatever it is. The sudden glimpse of a joy beyond the walls of the world. We do get glimpses of it, I think, if we have our eyes opened for that possibility, like when I suddenly realized that I was at the manger, or being at SeaWorld where I saw the peaceable kingdom and Eden and tears filled my eyes and also the eyes of my wife and daughter. These glimpses we have of joy - that's part of the news of the day and a very easy part to somehow let slip by.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, pp114-115.
To help you reflect…
When have you glimpsed “a joy beyond the walls of the world”? Open your eyes for the possibility of more glimpses today.
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I've found that keeping a gratitude journal helps me take note of those "sudden glimpses of a joy beyond the walls of the world," like the morning I happened to be watching several deer graze in the yard when a fox trotted by. To see two illusive species at once in the stillness of morning felt like a glimpse of the future when all creation will live in such harmony together (Isaiah 11:6-9).