He Who Loves Joy

From “Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places” by Eugene Peterson:

“We are not, of course, merely dust.  The Lord God breathed into the nostrils of this dust-man who then became ‘a living being’…

We are not slaves to necessity; we are in a fundamental sense free.  Our place, his creation, is given to us as is.  It comprises the necessary conditions in which we live: gravity and the second law of thermodynamics, procreation and our genes, weather and the seasons, for a start.  But within this world of necessity we are able to live in freedom.

Necessity, this place we have been given to live in, is not as much limitation but the field in which we can practice and exercise freedom.  The permission, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden’ (Genesis 2:16) and the prohibition, 'of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat’ (v. 17), in combination plunge us into a world of freedom and necessity.”

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Dear Alex,

I have the bad necessary habit of napping for 1-2 hrs in the evening.  My body simply collapses after the constraints of a 10-hour work shift.  I am not proud of this ritual because it delays dinner time and keeps me wide-eyed till midnight.  

Tonight was no different.  Same trend with 1 outlier:  I started cooking around 9 pm for my daughter’s lunch tomorrow.  

On the previous day I drafted the recipe after consulting her.  What exactly would you eat for lunch at school?   

Our playground for meal planning seemed soggy.  We knew it had to be a vegetarian dish because her school did not have a fridge for students to store food.  We also did not have a cooler lunch bag for reasons to be flushed out on another day.  Plus it must be something I could readily buy at the local supermarket and stir-fry expediently after work and nap.  But perhaps the biggest constraint would be her freedom of choice - a selective eater.  

If I sounded like a devoted parent, I must have misspoken.  For I have barely set a home-cooked meal over the past decade or more for my family or anyone.  On most nights after work, dinner was served from lard-loaded take-outs.  With the grease and MSG, the feeding terrain of our lives looked more like a pigsty.   

She got sick for the bulk of last year and missed over two months of school.  I didn’t think we could aim at one cause to explain away the complexity of effects.  I would imagine the desecration of food stewardship in my home could not have nurtured our tenuous relating to one another.  My husband and I launched a spree of medical appointments for her until we all spiked our spirits and sanity beyond hysteria.  Her loss of freedom in the fringes of those ailing months reverberated through this night of remembrance.  

A few months ago you introduced me to Wendell Berry, recipient of the 2010 National Arts and Humanities award, the most esteemed medal for humanities, bestowed by former President Obama.  In my ignorance I have not read or heard about him before.  A farmer and writer, he speaks about soil and community, food and lives, our homes, our meals.  In his poem, “The Habit of Waking” he invites our awakening to a vision, a habit within the givenness of our freedom:

Waking is a leaf, a hand, a light - envisioning 

White hands among foliage, red fruit, gathering.  

So it turned out tonight was somewhat different in ten thousand flavors.  Hands among foliage, gathering, awakened to cook her lunch for tomorrow.  A medley of vegetables and piano sonatas, confession and change in the solitude of nighttime playground to experiment more than desire in "a world of freedom and necessity”.  

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,


You've picked a quote from a book that shapes my life like no other else.  So when I read this passage again today I tried to step back as if meeting it for the first time, to seek a fresh perspective.

And what I saw was my wife's grandma, passed away four and a half years ago, and she told me she doesn't get this quote, all them talks about "freedom" and "necessity."  She said, "Life is life."

I think she was suggesting it's a false dichotomy, an arbitrary categorizing within an indivisible organic whole, pitching one narrowly defined ideal against the givenness of life, only because our generation has the resources, the luxury, the idleness of hands to speak from our armchairs, and whatever we call "freedom" we want more of it by the minute and would agonize over not having our will be done, which we classify as the "necessary evil" of living...

I am not sure if she spoke all that in those precise words, but I am sure she said "Life is life."  And that's enough.

If we are to listen to our own speaking honestly we can be just as concise.  That when life is sorrowful we won't try to brush the sorrow aside as a categorical necessity we're to get rid of ASAP.  That when there is joy it's likely not only when we've finally earned our deserved leisure and having it on a white sandy beach somewhere exotic, piña colada in hand, "worry-free" at last.  That if joy and sorrow are two strands we can no longer tell them apart and have no need to either.

“It was not the grief of human beings but their joy that Jesus visited,” a character in Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" thinks to himself.  Because, he continues, “whoever loves human beings loves their joy.”

Can we say that about our own life, even in all the "necessities" of it, aging, ailing, dying?

Yours, Alex