By Ryan LeBlanc

I asked someone recently, “What do you do that gives you life?”

It’s a great question, actually. It doesn’t always fit into every situation and dynamic, but if it feels like you can get away with asking it of someone, I highly encourage you to do so.

I find it gives us an opportunity to make the connection between our everyday surface actions and those deepest experiences and values we need to delve for. It also gives two people an accessible chance to talk about something real and important. I hace needed people to ask me that question, especially when I did not have a particularly good answer, and some have given me that gift.

In this case, it took a while to process the question, but thankfully, it was the right moment to ask.

This person replied, “I like to garden. As soon as the weather allows it, I am out in my yard every hour that I can be. Just being outside as an active part of what’s growing is something I love so much I can’t get enough of it.”

What a blessing to hear and speak this awareness of goodness in our lives!

Maybe this person appreciated this experience of reaffirming what it was that was good in their life – but I certainly delighted to hear about what God has given them! I also realized that, as much as I gripe about yardwork, I also have positive experiences gardening if I allow myself to have them.

Gardens are delightful

What is that great joy – that delight – which healthy encounters between us and the natural world engender in us? How is it that the material and spiritual demands of modern life seem to obstruct this delight so completely?

If we go deep down, and far back, into our human origin story, we find a garden.

In God’s revelation, Sacred Scripture, the first place humanity finds ourselves, the place that we were specifically designed for, has the name Garden of Eden. And one translation of the word Eden is “delight.”

So, where we have belonged from the start is the Garden of Delight.

Where God wants us to be

Continuing through the Bible, it is very clear that getting us “back to the garden” is God’s whole plan.

• God leads the Israelites out of a wilderness into a land flowing with milk and honey (Deuteronomy 26:15).
• The Temple of Solomon, where God lived with his people, is decorated with plants and fruits (1Kings 6:18).
• The Psalms and Prophets continually promise we will be like a well-watered garden (Psalm 92:13, Isaiah 51:3).
• The tomb of Jesus was in a garden, and when Jesus rises from the dead, Mary Magdalene thinks he’s a gardener (John 19:41, 20:15).
• The Bible’s final promise is a well-tended and fruitful Jerusalem, where the River of Life nourishes the Tree of Life (Revelation 22:1-2), where we will live forever.

So, from this Biblical background, I conceptually understand how God wants to be with us, as he was in the first Garden (Genesis 3:8). I think I get how he wants to overcome the separation that sin has made between us and where we were meant to be.

I am still learning to accept, though, that God desires for us a Garden of Delight.

Delight? Really? God wants me to be joyful, happy, delighted?

God created the whole world to be a Garden of Delight, for us to take pleasure in all he has made, “an active part of what’s growing,” as my friend described gardening.

God delights in us, and desires only our highest delight

This is difficult for me to accept.

What I mean is that when I experience delight, it takes work for me to make the connection to my Creator who also desires me to experience delight.

I am so used to distrusting my own desires, second-guessing my own judgments. In my brokenness, which I think we all share, I have grasped at what I thought was “good” (“a delight to the eyes” – Genesis 3:6) in rejection of God’s voice. We all know where that leads; distrust; shame; separation; violence. This is the sin of our origin.

While so much of our life of faith is about allowing our fallen nature, with its distorted desires, to pass away for Christ to rise again in us, I’m not sure that is the main project.

As difficult as it is to deny one’s selfish desires and submit to the will of God, I’m beginning to wonder if it is not more difficult to delight in the goodness of what he freely gives – that is, to accept the “more” (love, joy, delight) which stretches us beyond what we are.

I wonder if most of us muddling along this holy journey find the discipline of abstinence more reassuring to invest in spiritually, rather than the abandonment to abundance which God has consistently revealed to be his one great desire for each person and the human family. I wonder if these two ways reveal each other as sorrowful and joyful mystery.

Ultimately, I wonder if I can be more comfortable with responding to the question, “What do you live for?” than the question, “What are you sacrificing?”

For a God who delights in me, being joyful and happy seems the greatest obedience.

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Ryan LeBlanc is a teacher at Bethlehem Catholic High School in Saskatoon and a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Holy Family. His writing is available on his blog at ryanleblanc.podia.com

Catholic Saskatoon News is supported by gifts to the Bishop’s Annual Appeal: dscf.ca/baa.