Ever since I can remember, the days & weeks leading up to Christmas have filled me with a particular sense of longing. I understand this isn’t the case for everyone, given the grief that can accompany this time of the year, or simply the annoying onslaught of financial corporate interests constantly shoving their products in our faces. Nonetheless, for me, this particular sense of longing has only grown stronger over time. Imagining the picture of snow falling outside the window, families gathered around the fireplace, sitting next to a tree adorned in heirlooms and bursting with light, the sensation of warmth filling up the room–something about all of it does something to me. All the feelings of child-like wonder come flooding in, covering me up like a warm blanket, leaving me with this deep sense of longing that nearly hurts.
It may not be the Christmas season, but there is something that we all experience that gives us that same sense of longing; that momentary sense of sharp, intense wonder & self-transcendence. C.S. Lewis called these moments “stabs of joy”. Whether it’s the rapturous crescendo of a song, or gazing out at a vast and seemingly endless horizon, or simply smelling the aroma of fresh coffee in the morning, these stabs of joy pierce us all at different moments and in different ways, causing us to forget ourselves and long for something more; to desire something nearly unimaginable–something almost like heaven.
Have you ever considered why this longing exists? The more materialist, atheist types might tell you it’s some sort of evolutionary mechanism that helps you survive. All power to them. Perhaps these longings for something infinite and ineffable are just a mirage–a desire for something which appears to exist, but in reality does not.
But then again, I, along with others, do believe something different is happening when we feel such desires. Namely, that perhaps these stabs of joy are actually evidence of something that does, in fact, exist. That, just as physical hunger serves as evidence that such a thing as food exists, then likewise in the same manner, this longing for something eternal is evidence that a thing such as heaven exists. That our yearnings for something beyond ourselves is actually evidence that there is something beyond ourselves.
“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” (C.S. Lewis)
Lewis summed it up well when he said, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” (Mere Christianity)
I suspect the reason we feel a longing for something more than this material world is because there is more to this world than matter. Namely, that there is an immaterial Mind behind the matter that breathed into us things which pure matter can’t explain, and that these stabs of joy are actually moments where the reality of our immaterial nature pierces through the veil of our naturalistic assumptions and invites us to experience the supernatural. These moments of intense desire are actually echoing our pilgrimage in this foreign world, like faint aromas upon which the scent signals to our hearts that our actual home–heaven–is not that far off.
This is what the longing of Christmas does. It reminds us that we were made for more; that we were made for heaven. Moreover, it reminds us that, two thousand years ago, everything changed when heaven touched earth in a little manger in Bethlehem, and that heaven will touch earth again when the King comes back to establish heaven on earth for good.
That is, if we have the faith to believe such a thing. Of course, maybe you don’t, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to think that that heaven were true? Certainly, the fact that you long for it doesn’t make it untrue. What if, after all, all these desires and stabs of joy were, in reality, foretastes of what’s to come? Maybe, after all, it’s not that it’s too good to be true. Maybe it is so good because it is true.
Colton Banks 