“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in his 1908 book Orthodoxy. If you have spent any length of time with someone who is truly lighthearted, you have an idea of what heaven will be like. But what exactly is lightheartedness, and what is its place in the serious business that is Christian life?
In answer to the question, “How serious should a Christian be?” Dominican priest Father Gregory Pine reminds us that we are the “horizon of creation” – that is, we are the only creatures with a spiritual nature and also a physical body with its associated (and sometimes bossy) demands.
To become humble is to recognize the humour embedded within our design. God has endowed us with free will, which is subject to stray this way and that – and yet – he has also placed before us the loftiest of goals. We were made to spend eternity in heaven with God. How do these two items on the agenda gel? To be human is to experience the constant tension between wanting to relax on the couch a little longer than is good for us one day and bringing hope and a loaf of homemade bread to a lonely neighbour the next.
God has placed in our hearts an intense longing for himself and for our heavenly homeland, and yet “we have a strong desire for things that taste good and are shiny and attract our otherwise feckless attention.” Father Pine says it’s OK to enjoy these bizarre instances of dissonance in our experience because our life in the flesh is filled with “silly tensions.”
His advice? Just roll with it. We can delight in the glaring silliness of it all. We can revel in our desire for the “silly,” just as we delight in a child whose mispronunciations of certain words border on irreverent. This is nothing short of a sign of the Father’s goodness – that he would give us respite from the intensity that chasing heaven so often affords us.
Father Pine tells a story from the Conferences of St. John Cassian, where one of the monks recounts a story about St. John the Evangelist. Apparently, an early Christian walked in to see St. John (the Beloved, keep in mind) enjoying a lighthearted game with his friends. The observer in question was scandalized by what he thought was a flippant use of the apostle’s time. In response to the man’s criticism, St. John was said to have asked the man if he would continually use a bow and arrow, shot after shot after shot, and expect the same tension and performance from the tool. St. John explained that the human soul has much the same needs as a bow and arrow. Just like an overused bow and arrow, he emphasized, an overworked soul will eventually break under unrelenting pressure to perform.
“We can’t work continuously,” Father Pine reminds us. “And, when it comes to the soul’s rest, the soul’s rest is pleasure. The soul is meant to unburden itself of pain and sorrow by the experience of pleasure. So we should engage with delightful things which fit, which animate, which encourage, and which unburden.”
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