Exquisite Delight

Somedays I feel a little sorry for Darwin, always so quickly written off and criticized and scoffed at by us Christians, and I'm never quite sure if it's completely fair or not. This little article I ran across today definitely has some truth--enough that I'm reposting it here--and yet at the same time I feel as though it's written with slight chuckle of disdain, maybe drawing a caricature at times that's too convenient.

But that's not the point. The point is this tragic quote from Darwin's autobiography:

"Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds…gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare…. Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music… I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

Why he ended up feeling this way is mostly conjecture--and that's my beef with the article, I guess. But for me, today, it's a great reminder to lighten up, not be so serious all the time, enjoy God's good gifts, as in fact we've been doing in the past weeks with family. Vacations can be an invigorating act of worship.

[Besides enjoying the nature this past week--including watching families of loons and a bald eagle--there was also finally reading "The Little Prince" for the first time and writing music with Wes over top of the drone that the motor of the boat was setting.]

Darwin the man aside, I cannot accept that the people who create symphonies and poems, nor the people who enjoy them, came about through a long and slow process of change over time. And I am thankful for a creative God who fashioned us with an "emotional part of our nature," ready to create and delight.

And so, if that's part of our being made in the image of God, if that's part of worship, then here's a caricature of my own that may or may not be true: it's sad that many times American Christians experience more "atrophy of that part of the brain" than the average person.

Over the past five years, I've tried to encourage my sphere of influence to exercise "that part of the brain" a bit more. There has been slow and steady success, but there have also been times where I'm tempted to just keep to myself, letting all of us believe it's extra-curricular, nice but ultimately unnecessary for the Christian. Take it or leave it.

But, just as Darwin reminds me today, I keep coming back to the idea that, no, it's still pretty important.