Revisiting Christian Wiman’s Joy:
True vision, the poem says, is reciprocal: the world looks back at the eye that is strong enough (fortified by memory, alert to goodness) and weak enough (made quiet, the ego not eradicated but refined) to see it. […]
Sometimes joy really can be an intensification of happiness. It can crown and ratify a flourishing life, or be the spiritual fruition of a happiness that is not quite grasped or realized or is gone. But joy can also compromise, even obliterate, happiness. It can reveal a happiness to be so tenuous and shallow that, on the other side of the rupture, you can find yourself with no tenable—or at least no honorable—way back. Or it can disclose a spiritual existence the full realization of which will require some sacrifice—of a very real happiness, say. But to acknowledge that the line is sometimes there is not to admit that it always is. In any event, poetry does not usually refine philosophical definitions so much as weaken one’s need to see them, even as it strengthens the intuitive trust, tolerance for paradox, and general spiritual fluency that are required to thrive without such definitions. […]
Joy: that durable, inexhaustible, essential, inadequate word. That something in the soul that makes one able to claim again the word “soul.” That sensation more exalting than happiness, less graspable than hope, though both of these feelings are implicated, challenged, changed. That seed of being that can bud even in our “circumstance of ice,” as Danielle Chapman puts it, so that faith suddenly is not something one need contemplate, struggle for, or even “have,” really, but is simply there, as the world is there. There is no way to plan for, much less conjure, such an experience. One can only, like Lucille Clifton—who in the decade during which I was responsible for awarding the annual Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry for lifetime achievement was the one person who let out a spontaneous yawp of delight on the phone—try to make oneself fit to feel the moment when it comes, and let it carry you where it will.