Joy, Rest and Creation

Four Missing Pieces

A sobering article entitled Death by Loneliness documented that people are committing suicide and mass murders at an alarming rate because people are missing four essential ingredients to happiness: Family, friends, relationship with God that also gives meaning and purpose to suffering and finally, meaningful work. Meaningful work and a sense of achievement are vital to happiness. But production and achievement alone are insufficient. We also need joy, we need to delight in, rest in the work we have done. I love an arduous hike through the woods and up the mountain. But I am frustrated if I can’t get above tree-line, reach the summit and delight or rest in the 360-degree view that makes me realize, life is bigger than my projects or problems – life is really good. To be happy we need both the arduous work and the rest or the delight in the accomplishment of the work. In todays meditation we focus on joy and delight.

The power of the soul called the Passions are the good God-given emotions or desires designed to propel us toward good and away from evil. There are 11 fundamental passions: Love, Desire, Joy, Hate, Aversion, Sorrow, Hope, Despair, Fear, Courage, Anger. All the passions except one, prompt us to move. The single exception is joy. Joy may motivate action by its absence – when once you’ve tasted joy, you’ll do an awful lot to get it back again – but when joy is present its only demand is that you rest. Joy is the response to something experienced as good, and it invites repose in that good.[1] We are missing out if we do not learn to delight or rest in a job well-done. We were made for joy, not for sorrow. We have the capacity for delight so that we can rest in the good, and perfect rest in the perfect good – perfect delight – is the ultimate purpose of human existence. Heaven, the ultimate joy, is also described by the fourth chapter of Hebrews as simply entering into God’s rest. So if you can’t rest, how are you going to enter heaven? 

The Discipline of Rest.

What makes joy distinctive is that it prompts us to rest in the good. If we refuse to rest, or if we’re incapable of it, delight will be frustrated. Rest and joy go together. The first condition for delight is rest. St. Paul VI, in his exhortation on Christian Joy, worries that for many, “The burden of their charges, in a fast-moving world, too often prevents them from enjoying daily joys.”[2] When there’s so much to do, so much to get done, people run the risk of failing in the core responsibility of delight.

Rest and joy are an obligation, specified in the third commandment. Apparently rest is so foreign, so unlikely for human beings to pursue on their own, that God needs to give us a direct order to take some time every week and prepare for heaven by resting with Him. If left to themselves, people will prefer the merciless yoke of productivity to the joy of the Lord.

The Sabbath frees us from that yoke, it reminds us that we were made for God’s delight and not for work’s anxiety. “Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28). The Catechism beautifully describes the Sabbath as “a day of protest against the servility of work.”  Isn’t that beautiful? If you can’t say no to work, then you are a slave. Resting on Sunday is a revolution, it’s a weekly overthrow of the usurping tyrant of getting stuff done. Like sorrow, work is good in itself, and part of the human condition. But in the long run, our final purpose isn’t for sorrow, and it isn’t for work. We were made for rest and delight.

We Work So We Can Rest

In the book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper says, we should treat rest and joy, not work, as the goal of life. Many people treat Sunday just as a “recharging the batteries,” or getting “reenergized.” As though spending time with God, thinking about Him and delighting in all He has done, were just a kind of fueling up so that we could get back to the “real business” of life! But his is missing the point: In Genesis, God didn’t rest on the first day so He could work the next six; the order, like the purpose, went in the opposite direction. We work so we can rest, have delight and experience joy.

Joyless and Boring

Unfortunately, there are two addictions that prevent us from rest and joy. First there is the slavery of workaholism. If you’re addicted to doing, to producing, you won’t be able to rest and celebrate being. But the other is sloth or idleness. If rest means a celebration from reality, idleness is a restless attempt to escape reality. Picture a bored guy on a couch, smoking pot and playing video games to make him forget what his world is actually like.[3] 

For many people, life is nothing more than a miserable vacillation between these two states. People go to jobs where they slave away without seeing any ultimate purpose to their work, and then come home and Netflix binge. Then they go back to work, if only to escape the dullness of their entertainment. Pieper cites an author who perfectly captures this hellish incapacity for joy: “One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than entertainment.”[4]

The Better Picture

How do we cultivate true rest and joy? Most importantly, rest means realizing that what God has already done is more important than what you have left to do. Do something that makes you realize life is bigger and better than your projects problems. Spend time in such a way that when you walk away you say, “Life is good.” Now you must determine what that is for you, but it is imperative that you figure it out and do it.  

[1][1] “pleasure is the repose of the appetite in good.” ST, I-II, q. 34, a. 2, ad. 3.

[2] Paul VI, Gaudete in Domino, 5.

[3] As Pieper points out, Aquinas actually interprets idleness as a sin against the third commandment. It’s not fostering delight in creation. It’s not a restful state of mind. Leisure, 45.

[4] Ibid., 69.