Delight in the Good

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The Passion of Delight

The most important passion or feeling of all is the feeling of delight. Delight is, in its most simple description, feeling good. This is the feeling we all want. It’s the feeling we naturally and properly pursue. But obviously, we can’t just do whatever makes us feel good – drunkenness and posting a nasty comment online and oversleeping might all feel good; but those aren’t, actually, good decisions. To feel good in a good way means understanding what delight means and what goodness means – and then we can try to organize our feelings and our behavior accordingly.

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Good

We can define goodness as something that fulfills us in some way. So pizza is good and friendship is good and prayer is good and sleep is good – because all these things are fulfilling in some way. And whenever we attain one of these goods, we experience delight.  But we can go further and distinguish to basic categories of goods

`The first one is Partial Goods. These are things that fulfill us, but only in a very limited way. They give us limited delight – or a kind of partial, passing pleasure.

Then there is the Perfect, Infinite Good – God Himself. When we one day reach God, it will fulfill us perfectly, in every way, forever. We will experience perfect, infinite, unending delight – what is traditionally called beatitude.

This supreme delight, this ultimate attainment of the supreme good, should be the goal of every rational human being.

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The Order of Goods and the Order of Delights

So once we know what partial goods are (the created things that give us partial fulfillment and partial delight) and once we know what the Supreme Good is (union with God which gives us everlasting beatitude) – well that should tell us what count as good actions or good decisions

A good action or good choice – we could say a moral good – is when you pursue earthly goods and pleasures in a way that leads you closer to the ultimate good who is God.

Pretty simple, right? Pursue the good things in this life, but make sure you strategize so that you choose which partial goods to pursue and delight in based on what will get you to God.

By the same token, immoral decisions are the ones which go after partial pleasures at the expense of the Beatitude. It’s where you pursue some created good – which can’t ultimately satisfy you – in a way that neglects or even distances you from the Eternal Goodness and Joy you were made for. That’s just bad planning.

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Delight as a Response to the Good

Just as sorrow is the proper response to some evil, so is delight the proper response to some good. As we’ve seen, Heaven itself is delight – the supreme experience of delight that responds to an encounter with the Supreme Good.

The problem with people who “just want to feel good” isn’t actually that they want to feel good but that they don’t want to feel good enough. Their problem is that they settle for a string of unrelated and inevitably disappointing experiences of little created goods here and there. God wants us to delight in the good things of this earth – but He wants those delights to be an occasion of drawing closer to Him.

St. Augustine says we should delight in the goods of this world the way a woman delights in her engagement ring. It’s appropriate for her to cherish the ring – but that ring is ultimately supposed to remind her of her fiancée, of his love for her, and of her promise to keep herself pure for him. If she stops short at the ring, she’s missing the whole point of the ring.

In the same way, we’re supposed to delight in the good things of this life. But every delight we have should be the kind that can raise our minds and hearts to delight in God, and to resolve to stay focused on, one day, reaching the supreme joy of union with Him.

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The Discipline of Delight

All the feelings prompt us to move. Some feelings prompt us to move towards something – like desire or hope. Some feelings prompt us to move away from something – like fear or disgust. The one exception is the feeling of delight – which prompts us to rest – to enjoy the good that is before us. That’s why the book of Hebrews calls Heaven the Sabbath rest – because our experience will be one of resting in pure delight before the goodness of the Lord.

One of the ways we prepare for Heaven is learning to do just that – learning to rest and delight in the goodness of reality. We have to take time, especially on Sunday, the day of rest, to slow down and just appreciate the goodness of God and the goodness of all He has done. That’s not only a practice geared towards enjoying this life more – it’s also training for how you should want to spend eternity.