The river of your delights

“They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights” (Psalm 36:8).

My husband phoned from work (repairing a deck) insisting I find an excuse to take a walk. It’s sunny and 75 degrees, and the chances of that in a random Darwinian universe are nil. But the mercury does not begin to tell the story of delights. There are the waves of childhood memory borne on a breeze that grazes a dogwood, or the snap of clean laundry on a clothesline; they break your heart with longing, and yet you are glad to have it broken.

Scripture says that “when the Queen of Sheba had seen the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built, the food of his table, the seating of his officials, and the attendance of his servants, … and his burnt offerings that he offered at the house of the Lord, there was no more breath in her” (2 Chronicles 9:3-4).

This is what April does to us: “there is no more breath in us.” Yet King Solomon in all his glory, said Jesus, compares unfavorably to the rapture of a single lily (Matthew 6:29). And I would have to say that, personally, the greatest proof of the two kingdoms vying for our lives, God’s and Satan’s, outside the Bible, is the juxtaposition of spring-sparrows-and-gurgling-streams with sex-slavery-porn-backroom-deals—and Boko Haram.

Who are these fortunate recipients? … The most miserable hard-scrabble life has seen a sunset and a sunrise.

Psalm 23 brings us back to the “river of delights,” where God “gives them drink” (Psalm 36:8). Who are these fortunate recipients? What elite subset of humanity is allowed this happy state? Not elites at all! Verse 7 says they are “the children of mankind.” None on earth excluded. The most miserable hard-scrabble life has seen a sunset and a sunrise:

“For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good …” (Matthew 5:45).

God is so bullish on giving us pleasure that C.S. Lewis’ demon Screwtape declared Him “vulgar” and of a “bourgeois mind”: “He has filled his world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side” (The Screwtape Letters).

One hears the unfair mock that a Calvinist is someone who is worried that somebody somewhere is having fun. If this was ever true of a Calvinist, it is certainly a calumny against God. It is not from St. Paul but Seneca that Stoicism comes:

“Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith … who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:1-5).

The handiwork by which God declares Himself (Romans 1:20) so brims with its own intrinsic appreciative pleasures that even when we are indoors, as I am today, it makes us feel good just to know they’re out there:

“It is the feeling that would make a man unwilling to deface a great picture even if he were the last man left alive and himself about to die; which makes us glad of unspoiled forests that we shall never see; which makes us anxious that the garden or bean-field should continue to exist. We do not merely like the things; we pronounce them, in a momentarily God-like sense, ‘very good’” (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves).

I met a man in the dog park who belongs to an orchid club. “You talk about nothing but orchids?” I asked. I was put in my place before him and the angels. “There are 25,000 varieties,” he said.

Email aseupeterson@wng.org