Article January 16, 2012 Issue

It's no surprise

Kim Shippey

While we were planning this Sentinel on joy, I checked to see what Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, Colorado, had on its shelves. Most prominent was an October release, Streams of Contentment: Lessons I learned on My Uncle’s Farm by Robert J. Wicks (Sorin Books, 2011). Not far away was an autobiographical classic, Surprised by Joy, by C. S. Lewis (Paperback, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955).

Lewis’s personal journey toward joy is neatly captured in his take on the prodigal son’s ultimate triumph over some of life’s toughest lessons: “The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.” After many years in the wilderness, and even before God “closed in” on him, Lewis reached the conclusion that joy has its roots in “the Absolute, which is the utter reality.” That is why we experience joy, he says, “We yearn, rightly, for that unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal beings called ‘we.’ ” 

Wicks, a former Marine Corps officer in Vietnam and the author of more than 40 books, shares a smorgasbord of life lessons rooted not in God but in rusticity—his family’s 78 acres of forests, streams, and open fields inhabited by woodchucks, deer, red foxes, and crayfish. Yet one feels God’s presence in the wisdom he joyfully—and sometimes prodigally—dispenses:

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

No pawns in God's kingdom