The Consolation of Joy

I sat in my room alone with the mountains of schoolwork I had avoided. I cried for the friends that I had lost along the way, and I cried for the stress that was crushing down on me like a suffocating weighted blanket. There seemed to be nothing with the ability to console my weary heart. I was struggling and there was nowhere to turn.

Just as I heard the clock struck midnight as I had each night for more than a month now, I saw a figure emerge slowly from the corner. I wondered for a moment who this was and how she had entered my room; I saw her face as radiant as the glaring sun on a warm summer afternoon. This girl was younger than I, but she had an air of wisdom not often associated with children of such an age. 

It was not until I heard the sweet voice of the child that I began to recognize who this was. Joy spoke with words of authority and wisdom, but her voice remained youthful. “Why have you abandoned me for so long? Was I not faithful to you and in bringing you all the quiet contentment and childhood excitement?”

I turned my face away, ashamed. 

“You have followed the false trails of earthly happiness, these trials cannot lead you to me, and they will not lead you to that which is eternal,” Joy speaks with a kind and encouraging smile (Boethius 77).

With her words both chastising and uplifting, I began to ponder the ways in which I had forgotten Joy. I saw, as if for the first time, that I had looked for ways to adorn my life in the same way in which “it is customary for many to describe and adorn their things,” (Machiavelli 4). I had prioritized being busy with academic success, having more than my fair share of friends, and collecting beautiful things. I treated good things as ways to adorn my life and appear more than I was.  None of the things I had devoted myself to were bad in themselves, but they had inhibited me from clinging to Joy. Her words made that increasingly evident.

Joy moved closer to me in her Converse-clad feet and overalls, pigtails swinging. This child then spoke as if she had been privy to my train of thought, “ That which you seek, Olivia, is not found in these individual things. You are right in thinking these things contain happiness, but not in this form. No, it is misguided to seek them as pieces instead of the whole” (Boethius 81).

My face surely gave me away at that moment; I was confounded by this revelation. How could it be possible that what I pursued was in its whole form? What could possibly be the whole form? I spoke aloud then, voice quivering ever-so-slightly indicating my confusion, “Joy, I trust what you say, but how can I even seek the whole of these things if each one is what is leading me astray from what you say?”

“You must look beyond each thing. Success, friendship, beauty- these are fine things, but ‘there is nothing more powerful than the highest good,’” she said in a way that reminded me of Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society, and it was odd to hear from a child, no matter how wise Joy was (Boethius 114). “Do you not understand, Olivia; do you not see? It is ‘recognized that every whole is greater than its part’ and that you must seek that which is highest and whole?” Joy again spoke with the wisdom of someone well beyond her years (Aquinas ST, II. Q2. A1. arg.2). 

By this point, I had begun to wipe the tears from my eyes. I sat quietly in thought for a moment, and Joy sat beside me swinging her feet off the side of the bed, waiting for my response. I could not help but turn my mind to the highest and most whole thing I knew, God. Joy smiled beside me, and again I knew she was inside my mind reading my thoughts as easily as if her own. I must be correct. It is God alone who sustains my joy, in Him alone joy can be found at all. I never knew it was possible to rediscover something you never fully lost before then. I had lived not God-lessly, but without Him as my primary concern and aim in life. After all “you can wander from right reason when you imagine that you can improve by putting on the beauties of other things” that is what I had done (Boethius 46).

I looked up once more, hopeful that I had come to the truth, and I sought the face of Joy for confirmation. When I looked up, however, I was surrounded only by the same piles of schoolwork and stressors; Joy had disappeared. At first, I was saddened by the child’s absence, but I came to see that she had returned to her root and Creator, so I did too. With a renewed smile, I shifted the books from my lap and picked up the one that mattered, and I began to read. 

Works Cited:

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa of the Summa, edited and annotated by Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press, 1990. 

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by David R. Slavitt, Harvard University Press, 2008. 

Machiavelli, Niccolò, and Harvey Claflin Mansfield. The Prince. The University of Chicago Press, 2006.