In the Beginning Was Delight

In the beginning was Delight.

That’s what perfect love is, after all: delight. To love perfectly is to delight in the beloved. To love imperfectly, as humans often do, is to bite your lip and keep your temper and choose for the good of somebody anyway, even when you are annoyed. We do this so often that we might be deceived into thinking that biting your lip and being annoyed and doing good anyway are a superior and grown-up version of love, but this is false. The most perfect love is the love that is beyond all annoyance, beyond all loss of temper, overwhelmed with happiness and admiration and doing good out of that overwhelm. That is how God loves. Sic Deus dilexit mundum. For God so delighted in the world. But before the world, came the delight.

You can’t delight, if there’s nothing to delight in. So let’s say that God first delighted in God. For eternity, God poured out God’s eternal delight into God, and the name of the pourer is the Father, and the name of the object of delight is the Son. But the Son is also God, so the Son is also Delight, and the Son returns in kind everything that the Son has been given, for eternity without beginning. Let’s say the delight moves back and forth forever and ever, without beginning or end, and that the name of the movement itself is the Holy Ghost.

No human word can say what the Holy Trinity is, but the Holy Trinity is something like that.

Without Delight, nothing came to be made that was made. Nothing was made grudgingly.  Nothing was made stingily. Nothing was made just in case it might come in useful later. Everything was made joyfully, in an outpouring of excitement, as a gift to itself because it is a gift to exist– and also as a gift of love from the Father to the Son. And the Son delights in the things the Father made. The Son played upon the surface of the new earth, because God always has the perfect response to everything, and the perfect response to earth is to play on it. The earth is good for playing. Sic Deus delexit mundum.  For God so loved the world that He played on its surface.

God so delighted in the world, that play was not enough. He decided to become a part of the world, in a new way. It was His delight that the Son should come and live in the world with us, as one of us, and see Creation as we see it, and in doing so draw all of us into the Life of the Holy Trinity.

And when He saw that things would go wrong– and they have gone wrong somehow, very wrong, even though there is so much that is beautiful and right– He demanded to suffer the wrong along with us, to come to Earth and to take to Himself everything that was wrong, so that even suffering would be part of the Life of the Holy Trinity.

And the Delight became flesh, and dwells among us. And the darkness could not comprehend it, and we crucified Him. He suffered death and was buried.  Sic Deus delexit mundum. For God so loved the world, He descended into hell.

Of course, the Delight is not something that can stay dead, so He rose again on the third day, according to the Scriptures, and ascended back to the Father. And all who believe in Him will also be raised from the dead on the last day. Because the Delight is contagious. It’s not just Someone in whose image we were made. It’s also Something we are becoming.

The Delight of the Lord is in us.

Sic Deus dilexit mundum. 

May we live in that Delight for all eternity.

Image via pixabay

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

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