Joy conundrum – to feel it is to believe

There’s a strange sort of crisis creeping into the Western world, and it has everything to do with Christmas.

The crisis is not really political, or particularly religious. It’s a crisis rather of something much more simple.

We are in the midst of a crisis of joy. Last year The New York Times asked prominent writers to comment on subjects that were under-represented in modern literature. The non-religious Ayana Mathis replied that joy was the one subject modern writers couldn’t seem to understand.

She said ‘‘writers are a bit flummoxed by joy. We . . . seem to have decided that despair, alienation and bleakness are the most meaningful, and interesting, descriptors of the human condition. In our ennui and end-of-days malaise we have elevated suffering to the highest of the virtues.’’

Her words follow on the heels of the gritty, uncompromising work of philosopher and writer David Foster Wallace.

He wrote ‘‘postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists.

‘‘Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.’’

We are stuck, says Wallace, mocking joy while being desperate for it. There’s a very good reason he thought this was a serious problem. Joy is real, no matter how cynical we are about it.

Mathis argues that joy is something much more than just happiness, or a chemical reaction in the brain. It is ‘‘rare and transcendent’’, an essential part of the human experience.

Secular philosophers like Hubert Dreyfus (Berkeley University) and Sean Kelly (Harvard University) agree with her. They nicknamed the experience of joy ‘‘The Whoosh’’ and tried to lay a foundation for it in a secular world in their book

Atheists like Barbara Ehrenreich, or Kristin Dombek, also speak of random and powerful experiences of joy so real that they couldn’t help but think it hinted at something more to the world, something beyond what we see.

The link between these writers, and many more, is that the experience of joy left them with a profound sense of some other being, some eternal, infinite existence beyond their own. Joy seems to make all who experience it believe, at least for a moment.

And that is the problem.

In a world where we have long since let go of God, joy is inexplicable, while remaining uncompromisingly real, according to these thinkers.

After all, how do we explain the experience of the infinite so true that we have to believe in it, if the infinite doesn’t exist? How do we explain the realness of joy, if joy isn’t really real?

How do we write about joy, celebrate it, savour it and find it more often? How do we find a way to, in the words of Wallace, ‘‘redeem’’ our cynicism over joy if, ultimately, it isn’t real?

Mathis goes back to philosopher and church father Thomas Aquinas to try to answer these questions.

Aquinas’ argument about joy is still studied today, and has inspired modern writers like C S Lewis, and Tim Keller. These all claim that there is a solution to our conundrum over joy – it exists to point us to something real, something eternal, something beyond ourselves.

It exists to point us to a being who, like joy, bursts into our reality in a way too real to deny, and in a way that leaves us wondering if there is something more – which, of course, is what Christmas is all about.

And that is why, 2000 years later, we moderns can still find ourselves balancing on the edge of infinity, filled with blazing, exhilarating, infinite joy, and wondering how something so vast can feel so near.