Delighting
in God
by
Troy Cady
Moments of joy are the bookmarks of the soul. Like
folds on the corners of the pages of your life, moments of joy are wrinkles that
point you to something good. Turn to a joyful page mentally and you could swear
you were there again physically. Despite some hard things I’ve experienced over
the years, I am grateful that if you were to pick up the unfinished story of my
life, you would see many, many page corners turned over—reminders that life has
truly been filled with joys too many to count, unforgettable moments of
delight, grace and wonder.
I think of childhood
winters in Minnesota, playing hockey on an outdoor rink with friends from the
neighborhood. In my memory, I can smell the wood burning in the stove-fire from
the warming house, I can feel the heat and hear the laughter after my oldest
brother told one of his many jokes.
I wonder: as you reflect
on your own story…what pages are earmarked—what special moments of pure joy would
we encounter there? I invite you now to enjoy a bit of silence as you turn in
your mind’s eye to one of these pages.
I am convinced we can
never have enough of such goodness. So, in this essay I invite us to look more
deeply at the theme of delight. In another essay, I considered an aspect of
delight that we don’t often think about: it’s the reality that God delights.
Zephaniah 3:17 says that God delights in us and sings over us. Quite simply, I put it this way: God is not a
killjoy; he loves us so much he actually likes us, enjoys us.
I write this in hopes
that we will get caught up in God’s goodness to the point where we can reflect
God’s delight and wonder in our own lives. To that end, in this teaching I want
to explore 1) why delight matters, 2) what it is and 3) a few ways we are
invited to live in delight.
Why delight matters
First, why does this topic matter? To be honest, talking
about living a delightful life seems like a luxury to us. I mean…who has time
to talk about enjoying life when there’s so much work to be done, wrongs to be
righted, and improvements to be made? Ultimately, this is why this topic
matters. As a society, we are constantly driven to accomplish more and we feel guilt
or shame if we don’t. Sadly, this is an
indicator to me that we tend to take ourselves too seriously.
To be sure, this mindset of
crippling seriousness easily infects us. We live in a world where bad news dominates
the daily media cycle and Facebook turns others into faceless abstractions such
that we would do better to call it Hatebook. It’s easy to take ourselves too
seriously when we are overwhelmed by negativity, fear and anger. This causes us
to suffer from what author Christine Aroney-Sine describes as “play
deprivation, nature deficit disorder, awe depletion, compassion fatigue,
imagination suppression, and more.”[1] And, if it is true that
God is, in his very essence, filled with delight, joy, and creativity, then it
is also true that, as Aroney-Sine asserts, “…we suffer from God deprivation
too.”[2]
Our need for delight is
not a new concept. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas asserted that
delight matters because it is essential for happiness—and happiness, he says, is
“the last end [or goal] of human life.”[3]
In commenting on this,
Peter Kreeft, a philosopher at Boston College, says that happiness is the
ultimate goal in life “because all seek it as an end [in itself], not as a
means to any further end...No one seeks happiness,” he says, “in order to be
rich, or powerful, or wise, but people seek riches, or power, or wisdom because
they think these will make them happy...”[4]
That’s why Aquinas
devotes four large sections of his magnum opus, the Summa Theologica, to
the matter of happiness. In one article, he provides four reasons as to why he
thinks delight is essential for happiness.[5] 1) Delight, he says, is “a
preamble and preparation” for happiness. Just as one needs instruction if one
is to understand science, so delight is a teacher who prepares us for the
eternal art of happiness. 2) Delight, he says, perfects happiness. It is
like the soul of the body. If happiness is the objective state of total
well-being, delight is the subjective experience of it. Delight perfects
happiness because, through delight, we know first-hand that we are
happy. 3) Delight, he says, is a helper to happiness, like a friend
helping another friend achieve what could not be done alone. When we feel lost
and lonely, delight is a wise companion showing us the way to happiness. And, 4)
Aquinas observes that delight is essential for happiness because it is
“attendant” to happiness, like heat is attendant to fire.
The nature of delight
Aquinas’ fourth observation does more than tell us why
delight is important; it also tells us about the nature of delight. The mystery
of being human is that no person you ever meet is only a mind, or emotion or a
body. To be fully human (and gladly so) is to integrate mind, emotion and body—just
as it is in the nature of a flame to always integrate heat, light and the
substance (or body) of fire. To blaze with life, humans integrate (as Peter
Kreeft puts it) “the light of the fire of life” and “the heat of the fire of
life”[6]—while the fire itself is
given tangible expression through our bodies.
Delight integrates these
life-fire qualities of light, heat and substance. We experience it often as
warmed affections or quickened emotions, but we also experience it when our
intellect has been enlightened and we learn something new. What’s more, our
mind and heart converge in delight such that we can actually sense it physically
in our bodies—and sometimes this works the other way around, too. Our body has
the capacity to tell us when our mind relishes an exciting new discovery or
when our feelings are telling us we are falling in love. The taste of sweet
fruit, or the sound of ocean waves or the tenderness and passion of sex all
testify to the way delight unifies body, mind and heart. Just as it is
impossible to pick apart the light, heat and substance of a flame, so it is
impossible to separate what makes us wonderfully and mysteriously human.
Because of this, I find
it helpful to think of delight as the soul of life itself. And the
expression “Bless the Lord, O my soul” (Ps. 103:1) illustrates this vividly. We
often relate this expression to “the spiritual life,” imagining the words
“bless” and “soul” as invisible realities. But the expression “bless the Lord,
O my soul” points us to the body from first to last because the word “bless”
here is the Hebrew word “baruch” or “barak”, meaning “to kneel.” And the word
“soul” is “nephesh”—which means “neck.”[7] Significantly, the neck is
the crossroads where blood, oxygen and the electrical signals of the nervous
system pass through to integrate the mind, heart, lungs, and extremities in one
glorious living, breathing, pulsing, walking, and reaching wonder.
Thus, “Bless the Lord, O
my soul” could be rendered expansively as: “Bend the knee to the Lord, O my
everything. Neck, do your work. Let my mind be rapt in wonder, let my heart (my
emotion) be amazed and enjoy how good God is…and let my body show it: let me
laugh and sing, shout, cry, run, rest and rise. Let worship sink deep into my
bones; drive me to my knees because God is awesome and wonderful and beyond understanding.
Make me a put-together person.”
The expression denotes
wholeness, which the Bible describes as “shalom”—total well-being. It’s a
vision of human flourishing and, indeed, the flourishing of all living things. In
Psalm 72, we get a vivid picture of this “blessed” life of shalom. The Psalm
was written by King Solomon during a time of peace and prosperity. Food was
never lacking and the nation’s intellectual endeavors gained international
recognition. It was a golden age. Though this psalm serves as a picture of
Israel during the time of Solomon, it can also be taken as a description of what
happens when people and the world are whole (or put-together) by delighting in
God.
The Psalm says a world of
shalom is a world where justice is done, the oppressed are defended, and children
are fed. It says we are rescued from violence and the land is fruitful. As the
psalmist finishes painting this picture for us, he observes in verse seventeen:
“Then all nations will be blessed through him [the king], and they
will call him blessed.”
Our picture of the happy
life is enriched here because the word blessed appears in two different forms: “barak”
and “asher.” Both can be translated as “blessed” but the former means “to
kneel” while the latter connotes “gladness and happiness,” or “to make glad” or
“to be happy.”
The first instance this
word appears in the Bible is when Jacob’s wife Leah has a child and names him
Asher. Upon his birth, she exclaims how happy she is and that others will call
her happy, too, so she is going to call the child “Happy” or “Asher.” In Leah’s
story, happiness is both an objective state of being and a subjective
experience, both a noun and a verb.
That is the picture we
get in Psalm 72 and it’s actually an image of a king kneeling to serve, such
that the nations are blessed and the king is “happy” because the nations are
blessed.
Princeton scholar Ellen
Charry refers to this all-encompassing vision of shalom as asherism. It sounds
like a strange concept, but Charry sums it up simply: “God enjoys our happiness
and we enjoy God’s happiness.”[8] Asherism holds forth the
hope that one day we will experience happiness not as a momentary experience but
as a permanent, lasting reality—as it is in God’s very self. It affirms that
God made all things out of God’s own deep gladness and joy—and God made humans
in God’s image to reflect and experience that same gladness and joy. God wants
all that is in God’s being and all that proceeds from God’s being to return to
God, to flow in and out continuously in eternal gladness, like an endless ocean
of deep, enduring happiness.
Ways to practice delight
In her book God and the Art of Happiness Ellen
Charry includes several practical outcomes of asherism and I will mention two
before considering other ways to practice delight as a means to happiness.
First, Charry asserts
that to grow “in the art of happiness” it’s good to steward our talents and
strengths well.[9]
God, in utter gladness, has made each of us unique and it delights God when we
notice, appreciate and live in step with the special abilities he has given us.
Charry encourages us to be “unashamed” of our gifts, so if someone shares with
you how you have blessed them, you can just say thank you to them and to God
for making you the way he did. Just delight!
A second way Charry
encourages us to practice delight is to enjoy creation by stewarding it well.[10] For those who are
especially dedicated to creation care, it is good to remember to just enjoy
creation along the way and to let yourself be amazed by nature’s ability to
heal itself. In our work to save the planet we can sometimes feel overwhelmed. In
those instances, you might like to try imagining God right by our side,
smiling, sweaty and singing as he tends the fields and forests, rivers and
lakes. He notices the butterflies and bees before we do, so it’s good to let God’s
own sustenance of creation delight us deeply.
In any case, whether we
are stewarding our gifts or stewarding creation, both types of stewardship are
rooted in a key aspect of delight—which is noticing what God notices by bringing
all your senses, your full self, to your waking hours. I think of the delight
of cooking and relishing the taste of food that has been lovingly prepared.
Just the act of slowing down to savor a meal can do wonders to strengthen your posture
towards delight. I think of the wonder of music, the sounds of the wind,
crickets and birds; we have endless opportunities to delight in God with our
ears. I think of the many delights we can enjoy as we slow down to notice the
scent of a recent rainfall or a plot of flowers, the smell of a puppy or fresh-ground
coffee. Our eyes can delight as we slowly take in a painting of thick oil
textures, a black-and-white photograph, or the veins and colors of a maple
leaf. Gazing at the clouds, looking at the waves, or taking in the sunset can
fill us with awe and wonder. Feeling the sand beneath your feet, gently
touching a baby’s cheek, or just enjoying the feeling of water flowing freely through
your hands can be great ways to delight in God. There is no contradiction
between a godly life and a sensual life.
A key aspect of delight
simply involves slowing down enough to be fully present. The older I get the
more I am convinced this is the hardest thing for us to do. In a culture that
values the self-made individual, there is little that makes us feel stranger than
the experience of doing nothing. As soon as we have nothing to do, we fill it
with something else to do.
In his book Theology
of Play, Jürgen Moltmann observes how severely our desire for productivity
impinges on our quest for happiness. He notes that, for most people, even vacation
has become a phenomenon that must be put to useful ends.[11] Sadly, we often place
unhelpful expectations on our rest, measuring it by how effective or fun or
productive it was. Somehow, vacation itself even becomes work. Is it any wonder
that, irony of ironies, the leisure sector is considered an industry?
When rest becomes a market, something is seriously wrong.
The Bible commends to us
the practice of Sabbath to help us detox from our addiction to doing and
productivity. In Hebrew it is the word “shabbat” and it literally means “stop,
rest.”[12] The first instance of the
word in Scripture is used in reference to God. It comes right after Genesis 1
where we have a picture of God creating the entire world out of sheer delight.
Along the way, the story tells us that God noticed what he had made and blessed
it. But then day 7 arrives and the text surprises us. Instead of continuing to
make more wonderful things, God stops (“sabbaths”) and rests, truly rests. He just
does nothing and he just enjoys being with what he has made.
Lest we think this
anticlimactic, the writer gives us a clue as to why this “work of rest” is the
pinnacle of all God’s works. The writer says that God not only “blessed” the
seventh day, but it says he “got married to it.” Most translations render the
Hebrew as “called it holy” but the Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel points
out that the phrase “sanctified it” or “called it holy” connotes images of “betrothal”
and “marriage.”[13]
In other words, God loved this seventh day of rest so much that he said, “I
want to marry you; I will cleave to your side forever and love you
passionately.”
This is why the rabbinic
community has historically referred to the seventh day as Queen Sabbath,
because on the seventh day God, the King, took to himself a Queen—the nobility,
the dignity, delight and wonder…of rest.
A teacher I had recently
told a story about an experience he had with his grandson that illustrates how
wonderful pure, simple rest can be. He was visiting his family in Central
America and they were at a small, local grocery store. His grandson, who was
about three, said: “Grandpa! Come here!” The boy led his grandpa to the back of
the store where there was a pastry counter. He wanted the largest chocolate
donut you have ever seen, so…Grandpa bought it. By the time they left the
store, the boy’s face and shirt front were covered in chocolate frosting but he
still had a lot of donut to eat. As they walked towards home, the boy kept
eating his donut but they had to be careful because the sidewalk was very
narrow and there were cars whizzing by on a narrow street to their left with a
high wall towering up on their right. At a certain point, the wall lowered, so the
boy could sit down on it just to keep enjoying his donut. Grandpa noticed the
boy had stopped, so he turned back to catch him up. And as he approached his
grandson, the little boy just gave his Grandpa a look—and motioned (without a
word) for him to sit down. And there they sat silently, just doing nothing, just
enjoying being with each other, delighting in the moment. As the boy’s grandpa
told that story to us, he explained: “That’s why I think of God as a
three-year-old boy.”
Conclusion
I think the grandfather in that story is onto
something: God really could be a child, inviting us to be a child, too. I love
how Ann Lamott puts it in her book Bird by Bird: “Try walking around
with a child who’s going, ‘Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that
burned-down house! Look at that red sky!’ And the child points and you look and
you see, and you start going, ‘Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that
teeny tiny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!’ I think this is how we
are supposed to be in the world—present and in awe.”
Is it any wonder Jesus
said that we must “change and become like little children” if we are to live in
God’s kingdom? (Mt. 18:3) To delight in God is just to play like God plays, to
enjoy God and the world God has made, to rest, to stop long enough to notice, to
take ourselves lightly, to just be fully present to others, to honor moments of
silent wonder, to get your body into it…kneeling, savoring, listening,
embracing, and singing. Play puts us together, within and without. In play and
delight we lay down our compulsion to control and consume; we lay down our own
agenda…and just rest. Since we cannot achieve the end of happiness without
delight, let us practice it with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.
[1] from
The Gift of Wonder (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2019), 4.
[2]
Ibid., 4.
[3]
Thomas Aquinas. Summa of the Summa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1990), 349.
[4]
Peter Kreeft. Summa of the Summa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990),
350.
[5]
Thomas Aquinas. Summa of the Summa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1990), 382.
[6]
Peter Kreeft. Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1989), 125.
[7]
Eugene Peterson. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 36.
[8]
Ellen Charry. God and the Art of Happiness (Grand Rapids: William B.
Eerdmans, 2010), 275.
[9]
Ibid., 275-276.
[10]
Ibid., 276.
[11] Jürgen
Moltmann. Theology of Play, trans. Reinhard Ulrich (New York: Harper
& Row, 1972), 8-9.
[12]
Eugene Peterson. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 109.
[13] Quoting
a rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel writes “…sanctification is the Hebrew word for
marriage.” And: “The Hebrew word le-kadesh, to sanctify, means…to
consecrate a woman, to betroth.” See Heschel. The Sabbath (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 55, 51-52.
