About Lectio — Why "enjoyhim.org"?
Fully to enjoy is to glorify · after a discovery by C.S. Lewis
Lectio is a quiet corner of the web for the ancient practice of Lectio Divina — slow, prayerful reading of scripture. You arrive with a real question, receive a passage you did not choose, and stay inside it through four movements: read, reflect, respond, rest. This page tells the story behind our name — enjoyhim.org — which comes from a discovery C.S. Lewis made about praise and joy, and about what God is actually inviting us into when he asks for our praise.
The name of this site
The Westminster Shorter Catechism opens by asking what humanity’s chief end is, and its answer ends: "…and to enjoy him forever." For a long time that sounded like two different things — duty and delight — and, honestly, the duty half spoke louder. It was C.S. Lewis who showed that they are one thing. This site takes its name from the second half of that answer, because the delight is the point: the goal of the practice here is not to extract answers from God but to enjoy God himself.
Lewis’s stumbling block
Early in his Christian life, Lewis struggled with the idea that God demands our praise and commands us to give him glory — it sounded like a monarch soliciting compliments. In Reflections on the Psalms he describes how the objection dissolved, once he noticed what praise actually is. The most obvious fact about praise had, he wrote, "strangely escaped" him:
"I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise… The world rings with praise — lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game — praise of weather, wines, dishes, mountains, flowers, children."
"Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible."
Praise completes enjoyment
Then came the deeper discovery — praise is not an invoice attached to joy; it is joy’s completion. Lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are, and it is not out of compliment: the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.
"I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation."
The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
How this shapes a reading practice
The command is an invitation
When God commands our praise, he is not collecting flattery — he is offering "the supreme in joy and fullness of life." Everything on this site follows from that: if glorifying and enjoying are one thing, then reading scripture slowly is not homework. It is the beginning of delight.
Receiving, not extracting
The verses arrive unchosen, and the practice refuses to turn them into an oracle. What we seek is not an answer but a Person: the delight is in God himself, not merely in his answers or gifts. That is the theology underneath our "not divination" line.
Praise is what whole hearts do
Lewis noticed that the humblest, most balanced minds praised most, while "the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least." Praise is inner health made audible — so every reading here ends in rest and amen, not in analysis.
The verse the issue ends with
I delight greatly in the LORD; my soul rejoices in my God. For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of his righteousness, as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
Isaiah 61:10 (NIV)
Sources & acknowledgment
- C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), pp. 93–97. All Lewis quotations on this page come from there.
- This page follows the C.S. Lewis Institute’s monthly devotional "Reflections," May 2012 issue, which centres on this passage. Read the original
- Curious about the practice itself — the four movements, why this is not divination, how a reading unfolds? Read the Approach page.