Shadowlands and Songs of Light: An Epic Journey Into Joy and Healing

THE BEGINNING

ALWAYS WINTER BUT NEVER CHRISTMAS

The news came while I held the book Planet Narnia in my hands, about to turn the page. My dad was calling from California, three days after Christmas. I was in snowy Ohio, and getting a call from him while I traveled was unusual. Although close, we weren’t phone people, instead preferring face-to-face conversations, usually with a good cup of coffee or a leisurely dinner. There had been several missed calls already and urgent text messages asking me to call back as soon as possible, though I hadn’t heard or seen any of them. I had been away from my phone all morning, and I didn’t think to check my phone as I sat down to read. I was too eager to dive into the world of Narnia. Another call came in. This time I was within earshot of the phone, and I looked and saw all the missed messages. Fear fluttered in my stomach as I lifted the phone to my ear. Something wasn’t right.

By the time the conversation ended, tears slid down my face and fell onto the book.

My mom had passed away during the night.

No one had seen it coming. She had some unusual health problems for a sixty-two-year-old, but nothing that had brought the d word to our lips during our Christmas celebration. Only a week earlier she had called me, excited about watching the Christmas movie Elf with me when I returned home.

I had been finishing page twenty-nine of Planet Narnia when the call came in. A few weeks later, I returned to the book to distract myself, but as I turned to page thirty, I couldn’t bear reading it. The page became a point of terrible demarcation, a boundary line as imposing as the Abyss. A few weeks earlier, when I had read page twenty-nine, my mom had been alive. But on page thirty she was gone from the world. A sliver of paper had formed a chasm as significant as BC and AD in history, and it now divided my life.

My mom loved books like Planet Narnia. She would not have approved of me putting it down. But I couldn’t help it. Reading about Narnia had changed from joy to dismal darkness. A shadow had fallen over those lands, enshrouding even the golden face of Aslan the great lion. In the story The Magician’s Nephew, a miraculous fruit from Aslan saved Digory’s ailing mother from death. But instead of a lion bringing a gift to me in the nick of time, a season when it is always winter but never Christmas¹ came, as if the White Witch had returned and re-established her terrible kingdom.

Moments of bitterness—and envy—struck when I least expected it. The thought of Christians I knew who had received miracles made me angry. Why hadn’t God done a miracle for me?

Many of us struggle with the theological problem of pain, asking the age-old question, Why, God? The same question troubled C. S. Lewis, who lost his mother and his wife to cancer. Bono, the lead singer and lyricist of U2, also wrestled with the question; he lost his mother to a brain aneurysm when he was fourteen. It is the struggle of every doubter who asks, If God is both good and all powerful, why is there suffering? The Bible has a powerful answer to that question, but the emotional bitterness of the question still aches in the front of our minds like a throbbing headache during difficult times, and especially when we lose someone or something precious to us. And if the sting is severe enough, grief turns into hopelessness.

Of course, the Bible resists such hopelessness, and for good reason. We could spend our lifetimes tracing the stratospheric arc of Christ’s triumph over sin, death, and the Devil, and never come to the end of it.

In fact, for a brief time after my mom’s death, the power of Christ’s triumph roared through my spirit. At her funeral I even sang a song of jubilant praise, rejoicing in her life and in the victory she had found in Christ. I wanted to be strong for my family during that time, and God aided me. Those early days flashed with the light of heaven, a wordless glimpse of what I would later rediscover and place into words.

But as time passed, as the initial shock wore off and the full weight of the loss began to settle in, the light in my heart grew dim and flickered on and off unpredictably, and I wrestled terribly with my mother’s passing. Whenever the stormy days hit, none of the trumpet blasts or shouts of Jesus’ victory broke through the noise. With a tired shake of my head, I would read, Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13 NIV), and Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? (1 Cor. 15:55 NIV).

On the darkest days, such passages would mock me. Where, O death, is your sting? the verse would say, and I would bitterly reply, It’s right here in my chest!

Questions haunted me. How is a Christian’s grief different experientially from the world’s grief? Yes, we have hope about life after death, but what do we do with it? Is it just an intellectual proposition that we store away with our memory verses? If it is supposed to change the way we grieve, how does that happen? How does it travel from abstract head knowledge to concrete, rib-shaking reality?

A cold, tired flatness settled over me as I sought answers. I tried to write a book that compared Lewis’ The Problem of Pain with the works of Beethoven, but there was no fire in it. Lewis’ words—at times carried along in The Problem of Pain with the diplomatic candor of a doctor explaining a disease—felt dry and lifeless to me, which was unusual. Equally strange, Beethoven’s wondrous music fell flat. I had no real joy in sight.

Then September 9, 2014 came. I did not know it at the time, but that day—which began rather strangely—would change the course of my life. That morning, I was hiking on local beach trails when my brother texted me that U2 had just released their new album, Songs Of Innocence, for free on iTunes. A lifelong U2 fan, I came close to leaping and shouting in celebration right there on the dusty sea cliff trails. It was a windy day, and the coastal environment seemed to rejoice with me. The ice plants and coastal sage scrub shivered with goose bumps as Bono sang about miracles and California sunsets, and the Santa Barbara surf clapped to the music with every breaking wave.

The album awakened something deep within me. I rushed home and poured my thoughts into a review of the album. A few days later, Scott Calhoun, an author and scholar (and a diehard U2 fan like myself), read my review online and contacted me. As we spoke, he mentioned bringing U2 and C. S. Lewis together in a book.

Another light turned on. What if I wrote about my experiences with U2’s music instead of Beethoven’s? (Sorry, Ludwig.) The task of capturing such personal moments, however, felt daunting. God had used piles of U2 albums in my life, but I had never tried to shape those experiences into a book. Such experiences were intensely personal and difficult to articulate, and I had been stuck in exhaustion and mire. The cold flatness wouldn’t leave. I doubted myself.

But as I placed the books of C. S. Lewis and the music of U2 into dialogue—with Christ facilitating between the two parties—God cut through the difficulty and began to address my questions about grief. He threw the gates open, and his answers astonished me.

The ice inside began to melt. Something in U2’s music violently but gloriously cracked open the revelations that Lewis had placed with such care in his books—especially his idea of Joy. Soon my feet were walking along a path again. I was on a journey, and it was transforming me from the inside out.

I should clarify something here: I’m not interested in placing Lewis or U2 on infallible pedestals. I don’t necessarily agree with every word they’ve said from the stage, sung in a studio, or written in a book. But during a period of great inner darkness, the words of Lewis and the musical ideas of U2 became right Jerusalem blades² in the nimble hands of the Holy Spirit. He cut straight through the thick of night.

The answers led me into what I now call the Stages of Joy. These Stages form an adventurer’s map, containing all the things that Lewis and U2 have written about in their work: grand quests, larger-than-life worlds, roaring lions, ancient villains, soaring anthems, songs of heartache, and truth hidden away beneath the garbage and mean streets of this world that Lewis dubbed the weeping valley.³

But this book is not just for those who have lost a loved one. Death has many kin, and they come in many forms, not just funerals. When anything precious comes to an unwanted end, whether it’s a relationship, a career, a ministry, or our health, grief speckles us with its shadows.

In this journey, with the help of a large stack of C. S. Lewis books, we will steal down the shadowy slopes and switchback trails together to explore the weeping valley. Along the way, we will unearth many of the most effective (and affecting) musical structures behind U2 songs, and I will provide a U2 playlist that I’ve curated and carefully tied to each chapter. (The playlist will begin in chapter 2, after we’ve explored C. S. Lewis’ unusual concept of Joy in chapter 1.)

Together we will go on a quest for Joy. And when we are done, you’ll be able to listen to each Stage of Joy—a musical meditation to help you remember the points of the book for years to come by simply pushing play.

CHAPTER 1

HEAVEN IS ON THE MOVE: STABS OF LONGING

What a long night on the mountain—one that allowed little sleep. We had pitched our tent on the summit, and the wind beat on us until dawn, whipping the tent’s walls like flags. I was in grade school at the time, and the fierce blowing unnerved me. But my mother, an adventurous woman who had earned the nickname Mountain Mama for her love of backpacking, thought the predicament—the wind and freezing darkness surrounding our tent on a mountain—was paradise itself.

As dawn broke, the wind weakened. I emerged from our battered shelter and stepped to the mountain’s edge. A sunrise that seemed as large as the universe opened the morning like a Christmas present, its light glittering across the surface of the rivers and lakes below—silver bows and blue ribbons. I could see miles in every direction, with the mountainous green national parks to the west and the red dust deserts of Nevada to the east.

The sight reminded me of an album cover that bore four musicians standing near a praying cactus tree in a cinematic panorama. I would learn later that the deserts in the distance were not far from where U2 staged the photo shoots for their album The Joshua Tree.¹

After a few moments of standing there, I heard a roar above. As I looked up, an F-4 Phantom fighter plane streaked across the sky, flying low over the mountain’s summit. The jet flew at a slow-enough speed that we could see the pilot as it passed by, and he gave us a thumbs-up.

Something pooled in my heart, an expansive longing that surprised me with its intensity. It was not the desire to see another dawn or fighter jet. Those things were pinpricks that spilled an unexpected blood, a yearning that flowed toward something I could not name. The sensation itself—the sudden yearning for something far off and unknown—was more wonderful than a thousand sunrises and fighter jets.

Later in my adulthood, the longing came again during a lightning storm that I witnessed from the window of an airliner. We were flying above the clouds at night and could see flashes of lightning below us. Above the storm the night was clear, as pristine as a summer evening. The Archer constellation—the centaur warrior who bends his bow back to shoot—glittered above the clouds. As his constellation hovered above the lightning, the sensation again welled up, bringing an overwhelming yearning for something far off. I was almost ecstatic. When the yearning ebbed away, I wanted to feel it again; I longed for the longing.

I had experienced the same feeling when I was a child too. My mom was riding a horse in Montana in Paradise Valley, and I was small enough that I could fit on the saddle in front of her. She gave me M&Ms, one at a time, every few seconds, as we trotted through the wilderness. The candy and my mother’s presence brought comfort.

But then another sensation followed. The hugeness of the horse, its head looming before me and towering over my toddler frame, brought the yearning, though it was a quieter kind, filled with the helium of childhood.

I shouldn’t be surprised that this longing baptized me again when I visited Oxford, England, where C. S. Lewis had lived and worked for most of his life. I was a high school student and had gone to visit my brother Ian, who was studying at Oxford University. One night while walking across one of the ancient stone bridges—one that Galileo had likely strode across centuries ago—I looked up and saw the constellation Orion glittering like a cross in the sky. At that moment, my brother saw a homeless man huddled in blankets. He opened his grocery bag, pulled out a bottle of vitamins, and gave it to the man.

What an unexpected one-two punch. I saw the heavens glittering in the sky, and then I saw heaven appearing on earth as my brother showed the love of Christ to a stranger. All of it induced something beyond this world, an inconsolable longing that struck me in the streets where Lewis had walked.

C. S. Lewis would have called these moments of longing stabs of Joy.² In my conversations, so few people have heard about Lewis’ definition of Joy that when they hear me say the word, they think I’m referring to happiness or pleasure. But this special kind of Joy has little to do with circumstantial happiness. In fact, instead of saying Stabs of Joy, I find that the term Stabs of Longing makes Lewis’ meaning more evident to those not familiar with his writings.

These Stabs of Longing feel close to the intense sensations of homesickness—the pangs that come when we see a place from our childhood or hear an old song that’s tied to our past. Yet it’s not quite nostalgia. It goes beyond that. When this strange Longing stabs us, we feel homesick for a home we’ve never had.

Dr. Timothy Keller, in one of his sermons at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, talked about this Joy, and he wondered if some faint memory of Eden’s paradise—that perfect bliss of fellowship we once enjoyed with God, heart-to-heart and knee-to-knee, sitting with him on top of the world with our feet dangling off the edge—somehow still haunts us.

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, Lewis defined this special kind of Joy as an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.³ For him, the sensations would strike like lightning bolts. They would flash and then disappear: Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased.⁴

While reading a line from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf, the Longing stabbed Lewis, and he described it this way: Instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.⁵

Those few seconds of Longing, at least the ones that Lewis recorded, probably added up to less than a minute on the clock, yet they changed him forever, as he noted: the reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else.⁶

After I lost my mom, I was shocked to discover—especially during the first few weeks after her funeral—these same Stabs of Longing, though in a slightly different form, hiding in the shadows of grief. These pangs shuddered through my spirit with surprising strength and lingered longer than the usual flashes of Joy. I began to question the whole nature of grief. I felt like a man who sits in darkness thinking he is in a prison cell behind locked doors, but when the lights come on he discovers he’s free. There is no