God & joy unearned

...But it is immensely pleasing that some people, in their solitude, sing...

...But in adults, cluttered as we are, this phenomenon also makes itself known at odd times...

...It may be easier to see this in babies...

...He and the other recruiters went to dinner together and I stayed in my room, writing and reading...

...It was run by two pleasant young women who had little to do but take care of us, since it turned out we were the only people staying there...

...He was given the lightest possible sentence by a South African judge...

...The image of God in us has been pre-' sented too much, I think, as something involving qualities we associate with the intellect and will and self-knowledge...

...This sort of event is wonderful, but it is so common that it is easy to overlook...

...Later that night he returned...

...There was something a little depressing about his earnest ways...

...The violation of the image of God in us is not only, or primarily, a matter of the misuse of human intellect and will...

...There are all sorts of terrible clues that we are lost...

...I love what those abstractions point to, th?n look at my own heart and despair...

...I was to interview people who worked for a large corporation and then write an article about how the company hired and promoted employees at every level...

...Finally, before choice, intellect, or morality, there is that delight...

...This connects with the very ordinary kinds of goodness which are certainly more common than acts of violence or hatred...

...That makes sense...

...and then he began to sing...

...Two of the three recruiters were old hands, and they were joined by a very eager young man who clearly wanted to impress his colleagues...

...If God's image is in Bundy, or those who feel joy on the occasion of his execution, or in the man who beats another to death, or the judge who spares him, it is buried deep...

...I heard the lighter again, running water, water off, television on, then off...

...This past few weeks I read once more of Ted Bundy's many murders, and stories of people cheering Ted Bundy's death, and accounts of a South African farmer who, with the help of a friend, spent two days beating a black laborer to death for running over his dogs...

...An agnostic once told me the one thing that made not believing in a personal God difficult for him was that, at moments of the sort I'm describing, there was no one to thank...

...Evsn the good things seem so inextricably entangled with the bad, right judgment bound up with the passion of anger, real compassion with emotional self-interest...

...It has been presented very abstractly most of the time: it has to do with our will, our freedom, our ability-despite everything else wrong with us-to choose the right way...

...Deliberate choosing is an important part of the Christian life, but concentrating on intelligence and choice too exclusively puts too much emphasis on our end of that life, the one we have more or less in our charge and are therefore more prone to look at...

...It has to do with something much deeper, something which can take delight in a moment...

...but these moments show that that isn't all we are...

...That is the element oi unearned joy, which reflects an aspect of our encounter with divinity at the most basic level...

...they werenk singing for any reason other than the fact that it pleased them, it made them happy, and there is something whole and simple and good about that...

...Even at moments of less intensity a simple sort of pleasure or happiness indicates something about us and our relationship to the universe that we might overlook even as it is happening...

...I was walking with a friend the other day...

...Gandhi said somewhere that the real history of the race is a history of cooperation and kindness, and that what we call history is a record of the breakdowns of that underlying order...

...His motel room was next to mine, and the walls were criminally, or at least annoyingly, thin-I could hear the snap of his cigarette lighter, could hear him clear his throat...

...One morning I was reading in the lobby and heard one of the women singing in her office...

...Those terrible deeds and reactions to deeds must be seen next to the lives of people who are loving and generous, whose hearts are not hard...

...I went first to a campus where company recruiters were interviewing seniors and grad students...

...The very pur-poselessness of singing in solitude is a celebration of the moment, an often unre-flective song of praise and joy...

...The divine image here is the image of God who, in one scriptural translation, "made the sea monster to play with," and delighted in his creation...

...It is also essential to know that we are not basically different from any of them, from the murderers or the compassionate ones...

...They don't have a track record...

...Our freedom to choose good is not essentially different from our freedom to choose evil...

...Ted Bundy and Francis of Assist share a freedom and a nature that a culture which denies both true evil and the possibility of sanctity cannot fathom...

...Neither the eager young man nor the woman in the hotel knew they were being heard...

...and our horror at Bundy, or people who rejoice in executions, or who beat others, or torment children, all of these things are instinctive reactions to the violation of something we know to be holy, even if we don't use that word...

...she was pushing her child-he is about two months old- through a shopping center in a stroller, and suddenly he smiled with apparently thorough delight at something neither of us could see or understand...

...he seemed desperately eager to please...

...Cynicism about Christian self-knowledge is not unreasonable...

...He sang Frank Sinatra songs, and he had a wonderful voice...

...Cultures which admit both don't do much better: Torquemada and Cromwell knew they were doing God's will as they murdered...

...and I don't know whether the two people I overheard had a thought in their heads about "the divine...

...Something else also matters to our relationship to God, something we don't have much choice about and, for that reason, we may encounter it with more discomfort...

...Once I was given a dull but profitable writing assignment for a company magazine...

...Since childhood many of us, from many traditions, have been taught that God's image is in us...

...I know that many people, if not all, experience sudden feelings of joy attached to no specific event or reason, sudden moments of illumination which call forth profound gratitude...

...A few years later my wife and I were with another couple at a small hotel just outside of Galway...

...her voice was clear and beautiful, and though the song's refrain was "Goodbye, my love, goodbye," there was no melancholy at all in her song...

...At moments like that it is possible to feel an immense affection for the whole human race...

...In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine...

...That is about as broad and vague as a useful definition can be and still be useful...

...That flashing incidence of delight was enough to make me think that delight itself is a holy thing, made more obviously good by the little medium who carried it...