Perhaps I should apologize for my state of rumination, or perhaps I should not…
One day I will have a swing. It would be set back, just a little from the edge of a cliff, safe enough back on solid ground so that when I am in the ‘fro’ I would feel safe, but in the ‘to’ I would sense the exhilarating and risky excitement as I left the cliff, and swung over its edge. I would alternate in the backward and forward motion of the swing, between safe and risky.
Or, my swing would be in the shallows of the water, where I could wade out on a sunny day to where it sits, the anticipation of its delight wooing me to climb on – and swing! – my feet brushing the water’s tips, and the breeze rushing through my hair.
I would have a swing because of the enjoyment it brings.
I am such an even temperament-style personality that I tend to straight-line the extremes of emotion. I’m reserved, people would say. I’m self-restrained in manner, the dictionary would say. I would say, my emotions are just held. Inwardly. I guess I reserve them for a safe place and time. I can get news that could rock my world, and I’ll reserve that news for when I am alone and can process privately, but even here, I operate from relative calmness.
The same seems true of the enjoyment of things.
It’s why I love to be amongst the passionate cultures. Perhaps I secretly hope that their passion would infect me. I love their passion of life – the dancing, the colour, the singing, the joy of love and food and celebration, and also the sorrow of grief, or the fierceness of anger…but that’s not me. I certainly feel. I can laugh hard, or cry uncontrollably, or laugh until I cry, but I don’t express these things as readily as other personality types – or, as openly. I can remember times of deep grief, but my dealing with it has been mostly inward. And to ask me what makes me rage with anger? Well…nothing much!
If I were to think on –
En – as the prefix which means, to cause. And,
Joy – which is the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying, what would it be that I uniquely experience in this way?
Swinging!
If there were a dictionary devoted uniquely to each person’s lives, things that define them with their peculiar likes, dislikes, and way of doing things, my life-dictionary might read thus – “swinging, the emotion of great delight. The act which causes her keen pleasure.”
Centuries ago Julian of Norwich said this, The greatest honor we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love (Revelations of Divine Love). Sometimes I feel so distant to the emotion of enjoyment, other than fleeting ocassions. B
But because I do enjoy swings, perhaps I can allegorize. There’s great pleasure in being suspended – the higher the better – simply through a length of rope or chain and a plank of wood. Moving to and fro. Forward and backward, increasing in height. The swoosh of air on my face as it pushes against me in the forward movement, and then the losing of my stomach in the backward phase. My legs pumping to gain height and then releasing to go backwards. Then, if that swing is in a beautiful spot, or contains risk…ahhhh…I find it hard to get off a swing, once on. It feels…good…like I’m filled up on the inside in an elated, euphoric and exhilarated kind of way.
Perhaps then the swing is the metaphor of what enjoyment of God really is for me. The feeling of being filled up with good emotions, including contentment, satisfaction, elation, exhilaration, delight, pleasure, laughter, usefulness, and worth – just as my heart and mind and soul has felt on a swing. Is this what Saint Paul meant when he said, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God? To be able to grasp the full measure of God’s love – its depth and height and length – is to find enjoyment in Him and all He is. And in this life, there are forwards and backwards, moving to and fro, the good, the difficult, the backward movement all part of moving me higher and forward. And all of it is about coming to know and comprehend Love. The enjoyment of fullness leads me to seek more of it, like a being on a swing, seeking always to go higher and higher to get my fill of exhilaration.
It entices me, that His love is to be enjoyed: that I should get great delight and happiness in knowing His love, that it be experienced as something exceptionally good and satisfying, even safe one moment and risky the next. That I should feel elated pleasure in the knowledge of His love all beg me to ponder on the question of, well, how? How does a passive, contained, reserved (thoughtful, contemplative, inward) but yet still a very emotional being, enjoy God? How do I react to His love in a way where I produce manifestations of emotion or feeling? It’s not that I can’t, it’s just reserved, held, contained (perhaps places of worship should have swings!)
This is what I know: my experience of God’s love is often had in my life with nature. It touches my soul very deeply. Stunning sunny days can draw me to God in wonder as much as frightening crashing waves. I love it when I wake to those mysterious misty mornings, or a hot air balloon drifting on the breeze on a cloudless sky, and know without a doubt that He is saying to my spirit, Look, it’s for you. It is to be enjoyed as an expression of His love to me because these things make me think on Him. I too love moments of discovering something new about God in scripture and thoughtful meditation, and the expression and elucidation of thought as I write. “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say” (Flannery O’Conner), is true of me, and when I have all those random, jumbled, conceptual ideas and thoughts on the page, together with what I know from His word, His Spirit takes them all and they somehow come together to form something newly understood. Something precious. Something that intimately connects my soul to His. If I were to combine these – the engagement in nature, or pen and journal in hand, on a swing, that would be…ultimate enjoyment and worship.
Though I am a stable-minded person, sometimes my spirit almost breaks out in an uncontrollable joy – like it wants to express something that is beyond my ability in joy and worship and enjoyment – but doesn’t yet know how. Like it is searching for an expression of enjoyment that I don’t yet possess, but will one day discover. Will this fleeting joy be replaced instead with a constant and familiar emotion of great delight and pleasure, when I am finally fully in-Love with God? Will the words, reserved and passive – words true of me – be no longer in the vocabulary and nature of those who live within Love? Will my tongue be loosed? Will the restraints on my arms be released? Will my spirit feel the keen pleasure and elation of L
Then there’s this: God. Enjoys. Me.
What?! How can that be true, I do not understand! But He does, apparently. I kind of think He just tolerates me in my humanness, loves me because He is Love. But, He delights in me! Takes pleasure in the fact that I am. He smiles, finds joy in me – I even make Him sing Zephaniah 3:17! O, what it does to the soul of me to have someone who writes songs about me! This is hard to contemplate because deep down I don’t enjoy myself, so how can anyone else?
But, here I am, considering these things, lofty thoughts, the kind of thoughts one thinks on a swing, thoughts that seem like a nonsensical waffle, and certainly not practical to life. Thoughts that are philosophical by nature, mere musings. Of what use are thoughts such as these? Perhaps none other than a glimpse of what is to come, but with the longing to start here and now its experience. Humanity was designed to live Loved. Love filled and exhilarated the first Two, the only Two to experience this. I am soul-connected to these Two, to humanity, created to live Loved. Within is the desire to return to this God-design. Within is an ache and a hope that will one day be realized when the mundane, the broken, the inhibitions, and the blocks to Love are redeemed. Every day there will be full enjoyment in my returned and restored future. My soul will be home. Maybe these thoughts are just a longing for that – for home, to be Loved, fully.
Today, in this state of idle and trifle rumination, I am heading for a park, to find a swing, and here perhaps allow my soul to get a glimpse of what was meant to be, what can be experienced now (albeit in fallen limited form), and to think on what is to come. Then I guess I should look at my list of do’s for the day and move back into the reality of life. I will, however, in whatever I find myself doing, hold on to these words that are becoming truer to my soul, “I am in-Love and out of it I will not go!” (C.S. Lewis)