Sabbath: Delight

Don’t you get the feeling that in those six days God created straight out of unbounded delight?

The red-eyed frog, the blue morpho butterfly, the elephant? Only someone with a serious sense of humor could have come up with an elephant.

Yesterday I wept and my spiritual director watched me thrash about talking about discipline and trying harder. She wondered aloud if I could sit back and rest into God knowing that He’d already found me. We talked about joy. I shook my head saying I truly wanted that.

We talked about Sabbaths full of the search for beauty. We talked about taking our shoes off in the wet morning grass and watching butterflies flit from bush to flower around a garden. No one tells the butterflies to try harder.

Butterflies are delighted in for who they are, not for what they do…and you, my friend, you are too.

This morning I slipped away in the morning, cleaned inches of snow off the minivan and escaped to a coffee house for quiet.

I read this poem of Gerard Manly Hopkins, God’s Grandeur like I was remembering how to drink water:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Soon I found myself walking slowly through the aisles of an art store touching coral silk strands, packs of watercolors, and picking up gold pens wondering how fine a tip they had. Just because. Just because joy creates. Just because we are creators made in His image. Just because today, in a world coated with white, where the dearest, freshness deep down things are blanketed, I want to watch the colors bleed and meld…aqua and peach and Kelly green.

And you, my friend, how will you delight in this day?

May I pray a prayer of blessing for your Sabbath?

Creator God, You dreamed up this dear one because you delight in her. Will You grant her the gift of sitting back into Your rest? Can she join You on this journey of walking through her world wild with wonder touching the ordinary things and echoing your “it is good”?