THE DISCIPLINE OF DELIGHT
He delivered me because He delighted in me.
— Psalm 18:19 —
We dwell now in Easter, a season that calls us to remember and rejoice over the Resurrection of our Lord, and to find that Resurrection echoed everywhere around and within us. Perhaps one of the most significant ways in which we discover the Resurrection is by our renewed capacity for delight in others.
Our Lenten fast served, among other purposes, as an agent of revelation for the ways we unjustly lay our demands upon the world and the people around us. Engaging in this fast often required us to face our own loneliness. Henri Nouwen writes about this loneliness, and the anxiety it inspires, in The Wounded Healer: “When we are impatient, when we want to give up our loneliness and try to overcome the separation and incompleteness we feel, we easily relate to our human world with devastating expectations.”
For most of us, the devastation our expectations cause is difficult to spot. It might be discernable in the anger we feel when a friend or family member does not communicate love the way we expect them to. Or when we resent the failure of a coworker or supervisor to praise our accomplishments. It is to be found in all the small ways we expect our fellow creatures to save us from loneliness and fear. All the ways we have ceased to delight in others as God created them to be, instead demanding that they be what we think we need them to be.
The alternative is the simple discipline of contented, delighted presence with others. Delight is a joy that is fully present with another person without needing anything from them. Easter ushers us into a world in which this is the mode by which we are called to exist.
In Easter, we find that Christ has loved us this way. He has delighted in us — he has loved us without asking anything of us other than the response of our presence with him, and he has done this with an absolute generosity. By his death and Resurrection — embodiments of his delighted offering of himself to us — Christ has brought his Resurrection into our fear and loneliness. He has transformed them into humble delight. Thus, we are freed from our tendency to grasp after those whom we want as the solution to our wounds, for Christ has already entered our wounds and brought his life and peace.
The promise of Easter is the promise of a restored relationship between us and God, through Christ. As he restores our relationship with himself, God redeems our relationships with others, making us newly capable of delight. As he has delighted in us, so he transforms our hearts until our only desire toward those around us is that we might similarly delight in them.
Delight does not come naturally to us. We are fallen, fearful creatures — prone to grasp after security and satisfaction wherever we can find it, even if that is in another person. Thus, in Eastertide, we are called to practice delight as a discipline. I must practice this mode of relationship with the world, in which I submit to the reality that everything and everyone I love is wholly other than me. I have no control over them, and they do not owe me anything. If I will love them, I must love as Christ did in his death and Resurrection: freely, fully offering myself without expectation or condition.
Christ models delight for us by loving us precisely as we are, by taking joy in our existence — and by giving us entire freedom to respond to his love exactly as we choose. By uniting us to his life, he calls us to love according to the pattern of his delight.