The duty of delight

On Thursday we laid one of our sisters to rest. It was, as so many said, a lovely day for a funeral: warm and unwaveringly sunny; the sky a brilliant blue, against which trees thrust branches adorned with copper, rust and gold. During the morning Dilexit nos, Pope Francis' new encyclical on the Sacred Heart, was published online. By the time I got home someone I know through Twitter, who'd obviously looked through the footnotes, alerted me to paragraph 150, which contains a quote from our Constitutions. Wow!

The next day, Friday - unremittingly grey and sunless and dark, long before the rain arrived in the afternoon - did not seem to belong to the same week. After it stopped raining I popped out to the shops. I'd been working in an East-facing room, and all I'd seen of the sky was dull greyness turning to an early, dusky twilight. As I reached the end of the road I noticed the building opposite glowing red-gold... and then I turned the corner... and oh, the sunset! The sheer, astounding, completely unexpected surprise and glory of the sunset! 

I wasn't the only person on the Broadway who stopped and gazed, rapt with wonder and delight. And I remembered a comment a friend had made when, earlier this month I wrote of the simple joy of seeing some sunflowers breaking through the day's bleakness. My friend commented that this reminded her of Dorothy Day's duty of delight. This was something I had never heard of before, and opened up, to me, a whole new aspect to a woman I'd only ever perceived as a tireless, rigorously committed social activist and authentic witness to the Gospel in action. But, as a quick Google search revealed, Dorothy was a human who, like all of us, needed beauty and delight in her life and her Faith, precisely to sustain her in her work. 

By the time you read this, if you're in the northern hemisphere, the world will have entered its annual winter darkness. And this year, more than ever, it will surely feel like a reflection of the metaphorical darkness into which we are increasingly plunged by ongoing wars, pain, division and situations which can seem hopeless. In such a world, faced with so much suffering, it can sometimes feel wrong to draw delight and joy from sunrises and frosty mornings and the play of light on water; from rest and reading, playfulness, laughter, and the simplicity of cake in good company. But we must, if herein lies a source of strength, as much as in Love, and Eucharist and the triumph of Christ's death and resurrection. We need to find delight for ourselves, and be sources of delight for others. 

And so, to quote one of the articles I read: 

A world, broken seemingly beyond repair, stitched together with delight. It’s my duty to pay attention to the suffering. And it is my duty to pay attention to delight. Dorothy Day taught me this, along with all of my neighbours who have survived the ends of their own worlds. Together, we hope; together, we delight. Together, we live another day, connected to each other.

Amen: and may we all find and become sources of delight in our daily lives, stitching together our blessed and broken world, one tiny joy at a time...