This is the first post at the beginning of Enjoyment Week.
This is an idea I've had for some time to counteract a recently diagnosed
tendency to slow onset grumpiness, a condition that is not specific to me but which is like a virus, reaching epidemic status and from which the church seems to have no immunity.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace (and
six others). But joy comes second only after love. Enjoy is an
interesting word – from old French, "to take pleasure in" – like
diving into deep water and swimming, so being immersed in pleasure,
reveling happily in the environment that is our life and in which we live our days.
But does joy
refer to a preferred disposition?
Is enjoyment a way we choose of seeing and responding to
the world?
Or should such an intense word as joy be reserved only for
those occasional bursts of extraordinary pleasure we can't predict and make happen?
Can joy, and
enjoyment, be an act of will, something we set out to feel, a habit to
be formed?
Or is joy a gift that sometimes comes unexpectedly and
unbidden as gift and surprise?
Enjoyment surely can't be a constant
state – a life of unmitigated joy would self-destruct from an excess of
sameness and exhausted emotions!
Still.
I do think that joy and enjoyment have some moral content. Is there not in
all of us, an obligation to look on life without sourness, to be
receptive to gift, to detect and reject those first negative impulses
that once welcomed become complaint, and before long distill into
bitterness, or worse still reduce to concentrated cynicism?
En-joy-ment – to be on
the side of joy, to opt into fun and laughter as an affirmation of what
is good for us, and good for others. Because selfish joy is an
oxymoron. The connections between celebration and community, between
enjoyment and wellbeing, between laughter and contentment, humour and humanity, are not coincidental – they are creative links between the life we are given and the lives of others.
So a week of enjoyment means finding and making en-joy-ment in my own life; and making and giving en-joy-ment in the lives of others. And the week I've chosen for this experiment is the first week back at work after a long holiday. So if enjoyment is something we can make happen, for ourselves and for others, this might be a good week to try and prove it. One other thought.
There is a mini-lexicon of words that cluster around enjoyment, and are spiritually if not semantically related, and which if not the same thing, each contribute to that same inner sense of en-joy-ment.
You can even do a fibonnaci poem about them – just for the enjoyment of it :))
Gift
Praise
Laughter
Gratitude
Appreciation
Achievement and encouragement
Plus. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Live by the Spirit – and enjoy!
Part Mary Oliver's poem Meadowlark Sings and I Greet Him in Return, helps get the sense of all this:
Meadowlark, when you sing it's as if
you lay your yellow breast upon mine and say
hello, hello, and are we not
of one family, in our delight of life?
You sing, I listen.
Leave a Reply