Positive Pleasures, part 2

Today I am thankful for great literature and for the ability to read. I shudder to think where I would be today without the influence of great writers such as C.S. Lewis or Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare or Phillip Yancey. As I started making a list of my favorite writers, I recognized the futility of such an endeavor--there are so many! And I am thankful for them all! And, of course, God's greatest and wisest and most powerful of all books, the Bible. Honestly, there is just nothing much better in life than curling up at night with a great book--well, except maybe sitting down on the porch in the mountains, listening to the wind in the trees and the songs of the birds, reading a great book... or sitting in the warm sun with the waves pounding in the background reading a great book or soaking in a steaming hot bath late at night reading a great book. Okay, I'd probably be happy sitting in a dentist's office waiting for a root canal if I were reading a great book. Sadly, life seems to afford far too little time to read good books, but I snatch those moments whenever I can.

In his marvelous book, The Screwtape Letters, (which, by the way, if you have not read, is a must read!) C. S. Lewis has a fictional senior devil instructing a junior devil in how to tempt and seduce a human he has been assigned to that is growing too close to the "Enemy" (i.e. God). The junior devil, Wormwood, has to report to the senior devil, Screwtape, that he has lost the man to the Enemy. Screwtape scolds him and explains why he has "let the man slip through your fingers." The first of his blunders was in allowing "the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there--a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words, you allowed him two real positive Pleasures. Were you so ignorant as to not see the danger of this?... But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures. How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn't you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value? And that the sort of pleasure which the book and the walk gave him was the most dangerous of all? That it would peel off from his sensibility the kind of crust you have been forming on it, and make him feel that he was coming home, recovering himself?"

Don't you know just what he is talking about (in the positive sense, that is!)? Listening to a majestic piece of music or taking a walk and seeing the trees dressed in oranges and reds, or reading a moving piece of literature... all of it transporting you for just a moment and seeming to give you the faintest whisper of heaven? A touch of true and deep and lasting beauty and wonder that for just a moment takes your breath away. Such is a moment of true pleasure, and I believe, just the tiniest taste of heaven and of all our Lord has in store for us. Glories unending and unimaginable.

So thank You Lord for such pure and simple and good pleasures--reading, walking, hugging a child, stroking a dog, singing. They are each a pale reflection of You, the Giver, the Creator, the Sustainer, the Redeemer, the Savior. And to You be the glory.