What brings you delight?

What helps you to be open to delight?

What stifles your ability to delight?

Would you want that to change, if it could? How could it change? How could you invite more delight into your life?

How may all of this be connected with the well-being of your soul?

One of many marks of well-being with our souls is the capacity for delight. Delight is a sibling of joy, and a sibling of for wonder, which are also marks of well-being with our souls. Now, some of the other marks of spiritual wellness include things like compassion, like responsiveness to suffering and openness to sorrow.

Delight need not deny any of this. Delight is not a frivolous or superficial quality. Delight does not require denial of what is painful or sad.

Delight can live along with grit. And we’re better off when it does. Growing in spiritual maturity through the realities of life does not mean we need to be grim all the time, especially if the moment isn’t calling for it. In fact, we can tend to our spiritual and emotional resilience through tough times by keeping our eye out for the sunflowers that burst out of the trash heaps on the side of the railroad tracks, and allowing ourselves to take delight in them.

So, this season of Lent, which can bring out the more austere inclinations of a religious orientation, as we continue to live through what are truly troubling times, I want to give delight its due. Maybe an invitation to delight is what some of our souls need right now.

Invitation and permission:

What is sacred doesn’t always have to require our utmost seriousness.

In no less a serious and weighty tome as the Holy Bible, we find a most wonderful expression of delight that claims nothing less than to be a vital dimension of God’s creative power.

In our reading from the Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Scriptures (chapter 8), we hear the voice of Holy Wisdom, the formidable power by which God creates the universe. When wisdom speaks, she – and it is “she” – recounts her role in helping God bring form and order to Creation. The picture is one of joy, as well as tremendous power.

“I was beside God, like a master worker,
and I was daily God’s delight,
playing before God always,

 playing in God’s inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.”

Delight. Creative play. Joyful participation in God’s Creation. This is the character of Wisdom in the Bible. The master worker, the architect, the engineer, the craftswoman, the creative capacity by which the Divine Creator creates: Wisdom is not only smart, not only effective, not only formidable and farseeing, but Wisdom is full of rejoicing in the sacred activity of creation. 

When children make stuff, it is naturally an act of play. Creative play is a feature of intelligence, of creative consciousness. It makes sense if it is also a feature of the Divine Intelligence that tinkers this wild world into being, the Cosmic Consciousness that conjures up being itself? Play is in the fabric of the universe.

According to our faith, God creates the world out of Love. What do we call love for that which we bring being through play?

Delight.

When Genesis says that our Divine Creator sings and hums and speaks the universe into being, and God steps backs to look at it all and says, “This is Good!” what the Hebrew of the story conveys is joy.

“Wow! This is awesome! Look at it go!”

Can you believe it?!

A universe teeming with colors and sounds and kaleidoscopic forms.

There are Aardvarks, for crying out loud! And Uvulas! Bioluminescent mushrooms! Ribbons of DNA spooling through eukaryotic nuclei! Supernovas!

Apes who make fishing hooks and hula hoops!

And atom bombs.

One antidote to despair in the face of all there for a caring person to despair about in this beautiful and broken world, is our capacity for delight. (In addition to all the other virtues of humanity and sanity). Delight is a gift through which we get glimpses of a God’s eye view of the world. So it’s good to care for it, to tend to its needs.

The poet Ross Gay set himself the practice for a year of writing of each day writing a little something about a delight he discovered that day. The book that came of this, which was published a few years back, is called “A Book of Delights.” It is itself a delight … in addition to being deeply wise.

I recommend the book. And I recommend the practice. It’s pretty well known that naming our gratitudes each day, especially in prayer, is a very helpful, healthy thing to do, not matter what that cares for our well-being.

Why not include as well a delight from the day?

This is what Ross Gay wrote about the practice:

“It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.” (from the “Book of Delights.”)

What his book does as well is reveal not only more delight but also more depth. Through his practice of writing about his delight Ross Gay manages to teach us about growing in one’s humanity through encountering with the fullness of one’s humanity the sorrow and the horrors of what life and society can bring. He exercises a joy that does not deny sorrow or suffering, but embraces it.

He writes: “…in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and things we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.” (from the “Book of Delights.”)

This is a depth of joy embracing sorrow that the spiritual geniuses of our faith have sung.

This is from the Odes of Solomon, an early Christian book of sung prayer:

Open! Open your hearts to the dancing joy of God the Creator.

Let your love abound from heart to lips, so that you may bring forth fruits for the Holy One, a holy life, and speak with attention to God’s light.

Wake up and stand and be restored, all of you who were knocked flat.

Speak, you who were silenced. Your mouth has been opened.

From now on be lifted up, you who had been destroyed, because your justice has been raised.

For the power of God the Creator is with you all, to be your helper.

Peace has been prepared for you, more enduring than war.

So, I invite us to attend to our delights as a spiritual practice, a practice of our faith.

Now, I know that as a clergy person, one of the liabilities of the vocation is that anything I say can be used as a reason for someone somewhere to feel guilty. Sometimes I feel I just have to show up in a room and people are like, “Uh oh, there’s the preacher, what do I have to feel guilty about?” This’s a topic to get into for another time, but for the love of God I want to spread more mercy than guilt. 

I say this because I’m aware that there may be some of who are feeling, oh, I’ve been so down I haven’t felt anything close to delight in a long time, or I’ve been suffering with clinical depression for years, does this mean I can’t have spiritual fulfillment, is this another thing for me to feel bad about myself over?

No. For the Love of God, please know you are enough and beloved as you are. God delights in you.

The invitation to delight is not a test, but an invitation. Take it or leave it. It can be very small, a little prayer today that names a gratitude and a delight or something close to delight, maybe peeking into the room of delight. It can help to hear where others find delight.

So during our prayer time, in a few moments, I invite you to name for yourselves, and to share if you like, what delights you, where you have found delight lately. For our delight can be a prayer, an expression of faith in a God through whose wisdom we have all been created good and worthy of love and delight.

For this I give thanks to God.

Delivered Sunday, March 3, 2024, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.