Delighting in Good Things
Invite others to pray with you this Lent. Share the Rosary and win a pilgrimage with School of Faith!
One
Does detachment mean we can’t pursue or delight in the good things of this life?
When you read the mystics and the saints, they say over and over that we have to be purified from worldly attachments, that we have to renounce our worldly pleasures, that we have to give up everything for God, and we have to let go of all created things.
It might start to sound as though we’re forbidden from taking delight in anything. But that isn’t true.
It is true that when we get attached to one thing in a disordered way, we have to make sure we’re not enslaved to that pleasure, otherwise, it will interfere with our enjoyment of God. But the good news is that once we do get over our disordered attachments to particular created goods, it not only frees us up for the supreme enjoyment of God but it also frees us for maximal delight in the good things of this life.
Two
Addiction vs. appreciation
Another way to think about detachment and appreciation of created goods is to consider the difference between detachment and addiction.
An addicted person is someone who feels an overpowering need for one thing, a cigarette, a hit of cocaine, a glass of whisky, a pornography fix, or a gambling spree.
By the time you’re addicted, you get almost no pleasure in anything except your addiction. But what’s really interesting about an addict is that an addict no longer gets pleasure from his fix. All he gets is a temporary relief from the pain of his cravings.
So you could define an addict as: A person who feels an overpowering need for one created thing, who enjoys practically no created thing, even the thing he needs.
Three
What about a detached person?
A detached person is someone who can take delight in all the good things this life has to offer and is not enslaved or addicted to just one. A detached person is the person who likes everything. And because he likes everything, he doesn’t need any one thing. He’s like St. Paul, he’s learned to be content in all circumstances (Phil 4:11).
In other words, a saint isn’t someone who rejects all good things and takes pleasure in nothing, what a rotten life that would be. No, a saint is someone who has learned to take pleasure in every good thing.
So the detached person is the opposite of the addict. The addict feels the need for one particular created thing and enjoys nothing. The detached person doesn’t need any particular created thing, and so he enjoys every particular created thing.
The detached person is fully mature. God has expanded his palate to enjoy anything God serves him.
Four
Don’t reject God’s Gifts
God made you for delight, not for sorrow.
He designed you to pursue the good things in life and delight in them, but do this in a way that they lead you to him and not away from him.
He designed us to need specific good things to be happy. Most importantly, we need God, and we receive him by means of the sacraments, prayer, and virtue.
We also need physical and mental well-being through nutrition and hydration, clothes, homes, and exercise. We want to do something good for the world and others through our work inside the home and without through our professions and families. We want love and good relationships with family and friends. And our souls need to be nourished with truth and beauty.
God designed us to desire, go after, and get these good things and then delight in them. But all the good things of this world should teach us that they are not perfect, not lasting, and never enough. That should cause a hunger and thirst for God. So, we are to travel by means of created goods to the Uncreated Divine Good who is God.
Then when God allows us to lose one of these good things in life, for a time or permanently, it’s so He can give us something infinitely better - more of Himself.
Five
Detachment = Flexibility
What we are talking about is learning to be flexible.
Desire and pursue and possess the good things in life. Delight in all of it.
Flexibility or detachment means that I can be happy with this thing or without it. Then I am free to enjoy everything and always. Then when you are deprived of some good thing you simply say, “I like everything, but I need nothing but God.”
In Philippians St. Paul writes, “I never complain, because I have learned, in whatever state I am, to always be content. I know how to be poor and I know how to be rich too. I have been through my initiation and now I am ready for anything anywhere: full stomach or empty stomach, poverty or plenty. There is nothing I cannot master with the help of the One who gives me strength.”
Have your priority straight, we want God above all.
Be flexible. If I have this or that good thing, that’s great! If I don’t, I’m fine because I have what I need, I have God.
Detachment is not the goal. Union with God is. Detachment keeps all things in their proper order.
CCC 226 It means making good use of created things: faith in God, the only One, leads us to use everything that is not God only insofar as it brings us closer to him, and to detach ourselves from it insofar as it turns us away from him:
My Lord and my God, take from me everything that distances me from you.
My Lord and my God, give me everything that brings me closer to you.
My Lord and my God, detach me from myself to give my all to you.