To Buy a Field

When I was young, I had a brief, sharp exchange with my father about dancing.

“What’s the purpose of it, anyway?” he asked.

“Fun,” I said, “just for fun.”

“Fun,” he almost shouted (he was usually a quiet-spoken man), “the Apostle Paul didn’t teach having fun!”

It was a well-kept secret from me as I grew up that the spiritual life could be a pleasure. The church taught a rigid separation from the world and the world’s pleasures. Even though in our morning family worship we often sang,

“His yoke is easy, his burden is light,” my parents lived and passed on to me the burdensome yoke as the church taught. It wasn’t until I hit my thirties and a major life crisis that I got desperate enough to set out on a different spiritual path where I discovered pleasure. Not only was Christianity about bearing the cross; working hard at being good; practicing prayer, Bible reading, church attendance, tithing, and church regulations; and struggling with sin, it was even more about grace, forgiveness, freedom, healing, adventure, and joy. Being happy wasn’t important, I was taught, being faithful was. I wouldn’t be able to count the many Sunday School discussions I heard that ended up solemnly restating the fact that we were faithful, not happy. And the difference between joy and happiness is that joy is down in our hearts—deep down—and happiness is merely what shows or doesn’t show in our faces and behavior.

In the many years since the beginning of my discovery of pleasure as a treasure of the spiritual life, I’ve found that the way of my childhood church and parents was also true indeed—true as one part of the reality. The whole of Christian faith was truer when the missing pieces were included.

And so I set down here some places in life as I have lived and observed them, and the flow, back and forth, of these places with the treasure of the spiritual life. My goal is to be whole in body, mind, and spirit, and to see all of life with the eyes of faith. My parents very likely enjoyed their faith experiences in ways I didn’t notice. My father, at ninety-six, had become astonishingly freer and more able to accept new understandings of the Bible and the changes in the church.

I don’t want to write a book burbling and bubbling that the life of a Christian is one glorious balloon ride. We all know it isn’t, and pretending doesn’t make it so. I choose to believe and affirm with the Psalmist (16:11): God, “You show me the path of life. In your presence is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”

What is the spiritual life as I define it? Simply giving oneself wholly to God and God’s presence in one’s life. If it is as genuinely and fully given as is possible, the journey has begun, the adventure is unfolding, and pleasure seeded into treasure will be springing up like notes of a song just too irresistible not to dance to.