I’ve just started reading John Piper’s “When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy” and the opening chapter has one of my favourite C.S. Lewis quotes, from a little letter called “Meditation in a toolshed” (the link will take you to a PDF of it. It will be the best 4 pages/10 minutes you spend this week!)
It’s all about “pleasures” and I think it’s fab!
“Pleasures are shafts of glory as it strikes our sensibility… But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly they are. But in calling them “bad pleasures” I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean “pleasures snatched by unlawful acts.” It is the stealing of the apples that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is steal a beam from the glory… I have tried since… to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I mean something different… Gratitude exclaims, very properly, “How good of God to give me this.” Adoration says, “What must be the quality of that being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!” One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun… If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous discipline. But it is worth some labour.”
Tim Goldsmith 