The Enchantment of the World

Delight, Joy, Love 0

Love is the enchantment of the world. When we love the world, every grain of it, it shines like transfiguration. Love, as Tolkien said, helps us recover the world, turns everything into a fairy tale. Every leaf, every ray of light. Animals and plants. Mead and good music. The kiss of rain on your skin. The face of a friend and loved one. It all becomes magical. Even the eels.

— Richard Beck, Hunting Magic Eels, p. 233

Photo: Tide coming in, Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, June 17, 2026

A Joyous Yes

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Saying No to the self does not necessarily please God or please anybody. There is too much resentment and self-pity involved. When God, by love and freedom, can create a joyous Yes inside of you — so much so that you can absorb the usual noes — then it is God’s full work. The first might be resentful dieting; the second is a spiritual banquet.

— Richard Rohr, Yes . . . And: Daily Meditations, p. 309

Photo: Sailboat off the coast of Étretat, France, June 23, 2026

Made for Joy

Delight, God, Joy 0

I am deeply convicted that God’s heart for us is and always has been to live with us. God made us for and out of joy. As my best friend Nora said the day my daughter was baptized: being naked in the Garden was the original plan. This is a key that unlocks so much bad theology, but even more important, knowing that God made us for joy unclenches the chokehold that cynicism and despair have on us.

If God made us – all of us, with tummies and wrinkles and libido and hearts that break and burst with life – for joy, then imagine how joyful life with God could be. If we fully accept this godly delight, who might we become? Who are we already if we let ourselves meet ourselves without malice or intent to harm? What freedom is already here? And what might be even more beautiful than it already is?

— Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail, God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, p. xv

Photo: Water lily from Monet’s Garden, France, June 22, 2026

Wonder

Beauty, Delight, Joy 0

When I speak of wonder, I mean the practice of beholding the beautiful. Beholding the majestic – the snow-capped Himalayas, the sun setting on the sea – but also the perfectly mundane – that soap bubble reflecting your kitchen, the oxidized underbelly of that stainless steel pan. More than the grand beauties of our lives, wonder is about having the presence to pay attention to the commonplace. It could be said that to find beauty in the ordinary is a deeper exercise than climbing to the mountaintop.

— Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, p. 32

Photo: Tree Swallow, South Riding, Virginia, April 21, 2026

Wonder and Awe

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People who truly know how to wonder don’t expend a great deal of energy talking about it; they are off catching snowflakes on hot tongues. They’re folding themselves in half to smell the sweet potatoes in the oven just one more time. I no longer try to convince someone of the delight of soup dumplings; I take them to Dim Sum Garden on Race Street in Philly and let them watch me slurp. I let the steaming miracle broth run down my face and lap it up in remembrance.

I think awe is an exercise, both a doing and a being. It is a spiritual muscle of our humanity that we can only keep from atrophying if we exercise it habitually. I sit in the clearing behind Wisewood listening to the song of the barn swallows mix with the sound of cars speeding by. I watch the milk current through my tea and the little leaves dance free from their pouch. I linger in the mirror and I don’t look away. I trace the shadows hugging my lips and I don’t look away. Awe is not a lens through which to see the world but our sole path to seeing. Any other lens is not a lens but a veil. And I’ve come to believe that our beholding – seeing the veils of this world peeled back again and again, if only for a moment – is no small form of salvation.

— Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, p. 31

Photo: Cherry blossoms, South Riding, Virginia, March 24, 2026

God Didn’t Make Me to Hate Me.

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So how do we melt away the fear?

I believe it begins here: by looking at the heavens, and looking at the dandelion in the cracks, and looking at scripture, and looking at God, and trying an older and wilder way of trust. It begins by saying: God did not make me to hate me; God made me to love me. God made me out of desire. God made me out of joy.

— Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail, God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, p, xiii

Photo: Shadows of tree branches on frozen lake, South Riding, Virginia, January 30, 2026

Invited to Joy

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Jesus invites us to joy. The holiness to which we are called is to know joy in its fullness. We let ourselves be drawn to the Tender One whose face is unbridled joy. We are beckoned to this locus of joy, not a reckoning with the error of our ways but God saying, unabashedly smiling, “Get over here.”

— Gregory Boyle, Forgive Everyone Everything, p. 18

Photo: Cardinal, South Riding, Virginia, December 31, 2026

God Did Not Make Us to Hate Us.

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God did not make us to hate us.

God did not dream up the color yellow and craft the scientific art of making butter from milk and whimsically birth cumulus clouds just to . . . disdain a little girl who misunderstood the cosmic structure.

God did not count the hairs on our heads or the stars that would hang in the sky over billions of years just to resentfully accept desperate people begging to be spared from brutal torment.

I know this because maybe heaven isn’t a pit stop between Raleigh and LA, but heaven is all around us. Breaking in and barreling down walls and peeping up like dandelions in the asphalt. God would not be so creative and wily and beautiful all at the same time if God’s desire was punishment.

— Lizzie McManus-Dail, God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, p. xi

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, December 14, 2025

Look at the World

Beauty, Blessing, Core Value, Joy 0

So clean your windows. Take a look again at the world and see it, this time, the way you were meant to see it. Recover your sacramental wonder and be shocked anew by the color green. Become like a child and enter the kingdom of heaven. Count your blessings and rejoice. Always rejoice. Look to the horizon in hope, even in the Valley of Dry Bones. And remember why you matter. You are a child of God.

–Richard Beck, Hunting Magic Eels, p. 116

Photo: Blackwater River Valley, West Virginia, October 8, 2025