Joy

The Gospel Coalition site has invited various Christians to write about "The Page That Changed My Life." For Matthew Lee Anderson it was reading G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy:

.... Chesterton does not simply magnify "joy," a concept we hear much about and experience very little. He understood the permanent temptation to view the sadness and the sorrow as the substance, and the cheerful and uplifting as the shadow.

Chesterton marks out a path that leads away from despairing cynicism, the besetting sin of hipster Christians. When our resistance to the overwrought, pollyannish cheerfulness of suburban megachurch Christianity (or so the story goes) crosses over into treating the "real" and "authentic" as that which is broken and sorrowful, we have embraced a sub-Christian outlook on the world. ....

...There is a joy beyond words, a joy behind the veil that runs too deep to show others. And it is a joy that, when we taste, we realize that we are ill equipped to live with. Like those poor Israelites who plead with God to hide himself, it is goodness that we are not equipped to handle, even while we include sorrow and suffering among our friends. Here Chesterton closes his work: "Joy, which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. . . . There was something that [Jesus] hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was one thing that was too great for God to show us when he walked upon the earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth." [more]

Our Delightfully Strange World – The Gospel Coalition Blog