One of the stories my family has told about me over the years occurred when I was four or five. We were away on a long weekend trip to the beach, and I had just learned at school to sing the French nursery rhyme, Frere Jacques. I was so delighted with this new skill that I sang the song for three days straight.
Even now, when I think about this, it makes me smile as I remember the sense of delight, pleasure, and joy that I had in singing the exact same words over and over again. I am pretty sure my parents were not quite as delighted as I was.
The book of Psalms opens with a psalm that helps me to understand what happened to me as I learned that Frere Jacques. Psalm 1 builds on the idea that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who delight in the "law of the Lord" (Psalm 1:2) and those who are wicked (Psalm 1:4). (Note the word delight) And one purpose of the psalm is to make clear how we become these kinds of people.
In verse 1, the psalmist describes how you would recognise each type of person in the world. A person who delights in the law of the Lord is blessed because she does not take advice from the wicked, stand alongside sinners, or keep company with those who arrogantly think they know better than God himself. Instead, this blessed kind of person delights in God's law so much that she meditates on it day and night. The wicked are just the opposite.
I must admit that when I read this passage in the past, I understood it to mean that if I made an effort to meditate all day and all night, I would eventually delight in God's law. Most of the time, I am flat-out trying to meditate for five or ten minutes, let alone day and night, so delighting in God's law seemed a very long way off.
Lately, when pondering the idea of delight, I have begun to wonder if I had misunderstood. Consider this: what if delight is not the end but the beginning of this process? What if delight is the way God captures our attention, and the act of meditating day and night is the natural outcome of this delight?
You can see this pattern in my childhood story.
It started when I found something in that song that caught my attention and created joy and delight.
Then I sang it repeatedly. This singing is meditation. The Hebrew word "haga", translated as meditate in Psalm 1:2, can be explained with the picture of a dog gnawing on a bone. The dog will gnaw for a bit, go off and do something else, then return to the bone and gnaw some more, often burying it in between and digging it up to gnaw at it again. I did that with the song, going back to it repeatedly.
This repetition planted the song so firmly in my mind that even more than half a century later, I can sing it without error.
Delight led to meditation, which led to learning and change; that sounds a lot like the process in Psalm 1 to me.
A recent experience I had in God's word illustrates this process further.
Luke 1:26-38 tells the story of the angel Gabriel informing Mary of her forthcoming pregnancy. While reading this passage recently, I noticed that Mary's response to the angel (v34) was not to ask him, "Why is this happening to me?" but instead to ask, "How can this happen?" I stopped to think about what this meant, and I could begin to see some significant implications, which made me curious. At that moment, I experienced a little bubble of delight as I found something new and interesting that prompted me to want to know more.
As I went through the following days, I pondered what I had discovered, wondering what difference it would make if I asked God how he was at work or how I could respond rather than why this was happening to me. This is not the passive meditation in a quiet place image that many of us have but is a much more active process (like a dog gnawing on a bone). It is a process of taking a truth that has triggered the interest of delight and chewing repeatedly on what the truth means until we have absorbed all the good God has for us.
This good then gets integrated (our meditation has shifted it to long-term memory), and it begins to shape us as we integrate what we have been meditating on into our lives; in this case, I decided to experiment by asking how instead of why.
So here are three things I have learned from Psalm 1 and Frere Jaques
First, delight begins with God. It is the Holy Spirit who opens my eyes to something and calls me to pay attention. He is the one who injects delight into my day.
Second, delighting in God's word is not about the effort I put into meditating—it is not about effort at all. Instead, it is about having a listening heart, ready and open to notice those moments of interest and delight as the Holy Spirit illumines God's word, prompting those delight bubbles. And then being willing to keep chewing on what he has shown me until I have gained all the good that is there (this might even take years).
Third, I need both kinds of meditation. The scheduled, set-apart times when I deliberately seek to focus on God and listen intently for his voice are foundational, and I must make time for them. However, much of my meditation happens in the middle of my life. It happens when a verse or song, a picture, or a story pops into my head, and I choose to chew on it. In these moments, I am seeking to follow the Spirit's prompting to ponder it just a bit more, and I am letting him use these moments to transform my heart, bit by bit.
So, I am learning to pay attention to those moments when the Holy Spirit's bubbles of delight pop up and grab my attention. What is he drawing your attention to with delight these days?
Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash
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I love this, K. I so agree with the idea of delight. It is such a childlike thing. Perhaps that's why we are invited to be 'childlike'. Your article has begun a train of musings....
Thank you for writing.