The Slow Way: Epiphany and Deeper Pleasure

Jesus invites his followers to a new kind of joy: A life that neither flits through “senseless pleasure,” nor despairs in the in the pious religion of getting our purity math right.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

Let’s talk about sapphires. My favorite of the gemstones. Before Memaw ever left her house for full-time end-of-life care, she pulled me into her bedroom and lifted a ring out of her jewelry box. Memaw worked hard for every beautiful thing she had, and she delighted in the few jewels she gathered in her life, knowing that her Oklahoma dustbowl-farming mama could never have imagined such luxury.

The ring is too big for my finger, and not my style, so it’s been sitting in my safe, waiting for me do something with it. Yesterday, I walked into my town’s local artisan jewelry shop and asked the jewelry maker (my age, we know each other) to help me make something beautiful.

She and I talked about why beautiful things matter, why my grandmother’s ring should be something I love and want to wear, knowing that Memaw chose me that particular for me. We talked about how January in its ice cold ache is a perfect time to seek out beauty.

That’s what we’re doing in Epiphany. We are gathering the jewels and letting them be beautiful. And God in this scenario, is the grandmother who loved that sapphire ring, handing it over to the one she loves.

In this metaphor, practicing joy is not just about wearing the ring, it’s the work of shaping it to fit our finger, of delighting in designing it, in choosing every day to slip it over our knuckle and remember. The ring has already been given to us. We choose whether to wear it, whether to love it. This is spiritual practice, friends.

I got to listen to my friend Jonathan Merritt preach this past Sunday on the miracle at Cana in which Jesus turns water into wine—one might argue, the most fun of all Jesus’s miracles. It’s also a miracle that preachers across time haven’t always known what to do with. (Read: I distinctly remember a sermon from my teenage years in which my Southern Baptist preacher assured us all that wine in Jesus’s day was actually grape juice, so we didn’t need to worry about Christ’s apparent hedonism.)

I’m here to announce that wine in Jesus’s day was actually wine. And this hedonistic miracle is one of the three stories of Jesus we are invited to explore during the season of Epiphany. Jonathan reminded us that this wonder, this sign, actually kickstarts the whole ministry of Jesus. It’s a sign that points to the kingdom of God—a kingdom of joy. Or as Jonathan said, “The beating heart of true religion is not duty, but delight.”

He quoted Frederick Beauchner: “We need to be reminded that at its heart Christianity is joy and that laughter and freedom and the reaching out of arms are the essence of it.”

So let’s talk about about joy. In the book Life Worth Living, Miraslov Volf, along with his coauthors Matthew Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, explore the idea of joy versus pleasure, a question I’ve been tiptoeing around here as well. What role does pleasure play in the life God dreams for us? How are we who follow Jesus to think about pleasure, joy, and meaning?

Volf and his coauthors approach this question through the Buddha’s teaching on the “unease or suffering” caused by the “whole cycle of desiring, seeking, getting what you desire, and then desiring again.” This is the suffering of humanity, Buddha taught. That we desire and can never be satiated. To be free of that cycle is to rise above our unease.

This idea points to something we all seem to know but struggle to live: The good life is not about arithmetic. It’s not about adding enough pleasure to overcome the suffering of life. And when we live that way, adding up pleasure after pleasure, we don’t find a satisfactory equation. We all know the people who have pursued every possible form of pleasure and found their lives to be unfulfilled, lacking something deep. Real joy doesn’t seem to belong to those who maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

So then, if joy isn’t the math of maximizing pleasure, is pleasure in itself dangerous?

Jesus doesn’t seem to think so in this first miracle in Cana. The miracle in itself doesn’t appear too important. He doesn’t seem to have arrived at the wedding of his family friends planning to do anything monumental. Just a childhood friend attending the wedding of the kid he played with on the streets of Nazareth. He shows up to be supportive. Though it seems his mother—half controlling, half endlessly confident in her son (bless her heart)—basically makes the whole thing happen, simply because her friends have run out of wine. “Do whatever he tells you to,” she says to the servants while Jesus is still arguing with her that his “time has not yet come.” But, as all boys should do when it comes to a confident and controlling mother, Jesus obeys her.

As Jonathan reminded us, Jesus completes this miracle in his own way in order to say something significant. King of Metaphors. Of course there were empty wine jugs at this wedding that had just run out of wine. A son of God who can snap his fingers and turn water to wine could surely have done it in the typical jugs used to hold wine. But Jesus chose the giant purification jugs, the symbols of humanity’s filth, our need to wash ourselves properly before entering the presence of God. The purification jugs that sat aong the edge of the wedding celebration insisted that all participate in another kind of math equation: Enough confession and cleaning of ourselves to cover the impure stains of our choices—those we have hurt, the self-centered neglect of the suffering, our failures to love. The math of purification is to clean ourselves enough to overcome our ever-collecting filth. Are we more good than bad? Is that enough?

Instead Jesus introduces another kind of math equation: Wine is more powerful than water. We cannot wash ourselves pure enough with a giant bin of wine, friends. All we can do is drink and enjoy.

This is about pleasure, about joy. What is Jesus inviting us to in this story? It seems to me that Jesus is doing what he does best—neither maximizing pleasure for the sake of pleasure, nor insisting on purity for the sake of eternal salvation. He is inviting us to something richer, what Volf and friends call “quieter, more muted, but deeper pleasures.” Understanding that “not all pleasures are equal. Some are ‘senseless.’ They flit along on a whim. And while there may be a time and place for them, they aren't’ the heart of what a good life feels like.”

Jesus is inviting his followers to a new kind of joy in this first miracle: A life committed to the deeper pleasure, neither flitting through “senseless pleasure” that harms us, nor despairing in the pious religion of getting our purity math right. As Volf says, “How a good life feels has to do with getting in sync with something deep about the world—not just getting what we want.”

Which brings me back to the sapphire ring. Memaw wanted me to have it. She wrote this down and signed it with her own shaky signature: the ring would belong to me when she was gone. And it does. It is something beautiful and precious. It’s something I can carry with me and wear. But also? I have to adjust it if it’s going to fit me. I have to choose to pull this ring out of storage, to transform it in some practical and creative way. It is a luxury in the way that pleasure is. But once I’ve reshaped it to fit my hand—both physically and aesthetically—it will have a deeper pleasure than the simple delight of something rare and beautiful. It will carry with it my grandmother’s specific love of me, the care with which she chose me for this rare thing she once saved for and purchased. That’s a deeper pleasure.

And in the dark cold days of January, Epiphany invites us to consider this sort of joy: deeper pleasure, Jesus’s mathematical equation: to drink and enjoy the wine that was born of our need to purify ourselves, but has released us from that demand.

This is grace: that joy can be found in the here and now, that the good life is neither the math of getting more senseless pleasure than pain, nor the math of purity over failure. Somewhere the way of Jesus invites us to a place where joy coexists with suffering, and meaning is found in love and beauty, not because we choose senseless pleasure, but because joy is a pleasure that sits sturdy in the love of a Creator who wants us to see the world and find Divine Love inside it—a sapphire on a granddaughter’s hand.

A Slow Practice

What are deeper pleasures in your life? The pleasures that move beyond senseless distraction, and into the sort of goodness that makes for a life of meaning?

When I ask myself that question I come back to relationships, moments of connection with people I love, the people who will grieve me when I’m gone. I also think of the pleasure of experiences: the way a glass of wine slowly fills your insides with warmth and brings out the flavors of the food, the sweetness of laughing with friends around a table, the delight of sharing an inside joke with someone who knows you well enough to just get it. Even the pleasure of exercise that hurts while it’s happening and later makes you feel alive. I think about the way one of my teenagers can snuggle up next to me on the couch, asking me to tickle his palm like when he was little. The pleasure of being gentle and mothering him is deeper, because finding the love to tickle his hand is also the spiritual work of forgiving his rude comment from two hours before. It’s holy pleasure. It’s pleasure that asks something of me.

These are the pleasures that point to the dream God dreams of us becoming. What are the pleasures leading you to that dream?

Today, spend some time imagining what brings you the most joy in your daily life. Maybe it’s making your bed, or dancing with your person, or driving your kids and their friends around. Maybe is (gasp!) sex, or a long bath. Maybe it’s eating french fries.

Where does pleasure in your life become flitting, surface level, meaningless? And where is God present in the the things you sense are giving you deep joy? What does that tell you about who you are? What you love? What God is doing in your life?

Answer these questions. Write them down if you want, or just think them through in a prayerful moment.

Close with this prayer: Spirit bring me into the kingdom of joy, for the sake of your dreams for the world, and your dreams for my life. Amen.