A drink in the desert

I spent yesterday with a dear, close friend who's visiting from out of town. She used to live just a couple of minutes away from me but moved to Minneapolis five years ago.

(An aside: Want a new job? Like to see a new part of the country? The current joke in my life is that if you'd like to move up and on from this town, become my good friend. God will surely see fit to move you on somewhere else. Not sure what His plan is in all of this, but it's been happening with alarming frequency. What's that you say? This isn't all about me? Maybe it's about God's plan for them? Naaahhh....)

Back to my day (see? It is about me.) My friend and I spent a goodly amount of time in the car, happily talking our throats dry, driving to see another dear friend, our favorite priest on earth. He celebrated Mass then cooked a delicious lunch as we chatted, laughed, whined, complained, celebrated, speculated and reminisced.

I was reminded of this quote from C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, in which Wormwood is speaking to his protege:

I divide the causes of human laughter into joy, fun, the joke proper and flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reuniting on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticism produces laughter at such a time, shows that that's not the real cause. What the real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call music, and something like it occurs in heaven.

Yes. It didn't take much to make me laugh yesterday, and my friends laughed at my weakest jokes. The conversation itself didn't matter so much as did the context ... we were friends, together again, with a shared history and an understanding of one another's lives. I felt, quite simply, joy.

A snippet of music, a much-appreciated drink in the desert of Lent and a peek into Heaven ... this is what such occasions are. After all, as Lewis also said, "Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

May you feel some of Heaven's serious business today.