I stood with my friend Rachel in the hushed light of the Ashmolean Museum, fixed on Paolo de’ Matteis’ The Choice of Hercules. In this Baroque favorite, the hero is frozen at his crossroads. To one side stands Virtue—stern, armored, pointing a spear up a steep, rocky path. To the other lounges Pleasure (Voluptas)—voluptuous and relaxed, surrounded by symbols of transient joy. Hercules sits between them, the weight of a lifetime’s direction in his contemplative gaze.
“I don’t like this,” Rachel said, her voice cutting through the quiet. “Why is Virtue always portrayed as the hard life, while Pleasure is fun and easy?”
Her question hung in the air, putting a finger on a deep cultural wound. For centuries, this painting has echoed a lie we’ve often absorbed without realizing it: that God is on the side of the grim, the austere, the difficult… while all that is delightful and satisfying is inherently suspect, belonging to some rival kingdom.
It was then I introduced her to one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes (I’m annoying that way). In The Screwtape Letters, a senior demon grumbles:
“[God] is a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a facade. Or only like foam on the seashore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are ‘pleasures forevermore.’ Ugh! … He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us.”
The demon’s grudging confession unveils the truth we so often miss: the dichotomy in Matteis’ painting is a false one. We do not worship a God of scarcity and scowling virtue, but a God of staggering abundance, a God of beauty, a God who delights in providing profound pleasures for His children.
Once you begin looking through that lens, the world transforms from battlefield to banquet.
And look at the table He’s set. Our Heavenly Father could have accomplished His purposes with a bare, utilitarian world—a monochrome landscape, functional and plain. Yet, He chose otherwise. He crafted a universe of staggering variety and breathtaking beauty. The dizzying sweetness of a ripe peach, the helpless, perfect grip of a baby’s hand, mountains, deserts, oceans, and waterfalls—these are not necessities. They are gifts of pure delight. He strings the sky with colors at dawn and dusk for the sheer joy of it. Every wildflower is a love note. Every sunset, a postcard from home.
It brings to mind the prophet’s cry, a vision of divine generosity: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow...” (Isaiah 25:6). This is His nature. He is not a God of scarcity, but of stunning abundance.
Isn’t that the heart of it? The most profound pleasures are the ones that lie around us, free for the taking: the cool weight of a stone from a riverbed, the scent of pine on the air, the simple act of lying in the grass and tracing the slow drift of clouds. These are not distractions. They are divine invitations.
The demon goes on, his voice a grudging hiss of truth:
“Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on [God’s] ground... He made the pleasures. All [the devil] can do is encourage humans to take them at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden.”
Lewis returned to this theme again and again: that holiness isn’t opposed to pleasure, but woven through it. In Letters to Malcolm, he writes, “The real thing is the real thing: bread and wine, walks, work, sleep, a cup of tea, a book, a fire. If we can’t take delight in the simple things, we shan’t have the capacity for the greater ones.”
We sometimes fixate on the fences, forgetting the glorious field they enclose. God’s boundaries are not cages; they are the markings of a sacred haven, designed to keep our joy safe and whole.
And this is where the story turns, from generosity to grace. Every child stamps their foot and cries, “It’s not fair!” And in the economy of Heaven, they are right. It isn’t fair. It is so much better than fair. Through the Atonement of Christ, we do not get what is fair. We get what is merciful. We receive a bounty we could never earn.
I’m not here to lecture you on gratitude. You already know that a grateful heart fills your life with a joy that circumstance cannot touch. It is the key that unlocks the banquet hall.
So the invitation is simple and startling: “live in thanksgiving daily” (Alma 34:38). Those are the words on my mother’s gravestone. She died far too young, but in her honor, I try to live it not as an act of forced cheer, but as a way of tuning your heart to the music already playing all around you. Gratitude is the lens that pulls the world into focus, revealing the feast that was there all along.
My own prayers are changing. They are less about the list of things I lack and more about the eyes to see what has already been placed in my hands. Less about fixing what’s broken and more about noticing what still burns bright.
Because that’s the miracle: the banquet is already set. And the God who fills His world with pleasures—the God of peaches and pine forests and ocean tides—is inviting us, again and again, to taste and see.
I love the reminder that we believe in a God of Joy.
"God is a hedonist at heart." I love this idea and agree with it 100%. I have always believed enjoying life as much as possible within the limits that keep it enjoyable.