Making Room for Delight

I RECENTLY MADE the mistake of taking an extended trip to my favorite city. Istanbul is a rambunctious sprawl of cultures and histories—catnip for a writer, as I am, and for a college student, as I was on my first visit nine years ago.

Chief among Istanbul’s delights is the Hagia Sophia, first basilica, then mosque, then museum—part architectural wonder, part historical jigsaw puzzle. Above the ochre-domed great hall is the famous juxtaposition: a gilded mosaic of Mary and the Christ Child flanked by two enormous placards in Arabic script—the names Allah and Muhammad. The effect is somehow both solemn and conspiratorial, as if some divine negotiation has happened behind the scenes.

Hagia Sophia means “holy wisdom,” and to enter into its hushed halls, a thin winter light stretching its way across 1,500-year-old pillars to twinkle through heavy chandeliers, is to enter a palpable mystery. It is constitutionally impossible to behold the Hagia Sophia for the first time and not feel a stirring in the soul.

But this was my second time. After eight years of living in Washington, D.C., and working for social justice, I was carrying with me a very different posture toward the world—a suspicion of appearances, a stubbornness to accept grand narrative. I have learned much more about the world and the many ways it fails us since my first glimpse of a shimmering Istanbul. I’ve written about systems that rely on marginalization and the politically convenient, and I’ve felt, deeply and insistently, all the ways the world has grown more threatening for the most vulnerable.

The Hagia Sophia is no different. It has stood since 537, an unimaginably long time—and perhaps its cozy relationship with power, as much as its beauty, cements its continued existence: The Great Schism between Catholic and Orthodox churches began in its halls. Its meaning was looted and converted in the name of empire. It is now a secular museum, profiting from foreign tourism while under legal fights from Muslim and Christian groups as to its rightful identity.

The burden of knowledge can cripple hope, and those who work for justice talk often of self-care for the soul. It wasn’t until I stood in the doorway of my favorite building on earth, and felt my heart utterly fail to leap, that I realized the degree of the risk. In a complicated world, one in which every system we participate in is complicit, how do we make room for delight?

DELIGHT IS A whimsical word, seemingly too soft for use in the serious work of justice. We are in a corroded age, jaded from corrupt systems and election cycles and broken people at the helms of broken institutions. Is joy not a betrayal of everyone who remains wounded? What practical value is added by delight?

I think one answer may be found in how we think about the work of building. “The human mind takes apart with its analytic habits of reasoning, but the human heart puts things together because it loves them,” wrote philosopher and architect Keith Critchlow.

Every edifice of modern life—familial, agrarian, institutional, structural—carries a complicated history, shot through, at some point, with repugnant or downright evil elements.

But we are tied to each of these institutions, also, by affection. And in this love for what can be pulled together—even if not what is, or what was—lies redemption.

For writers, as for Christians, our business is to tell the truth. To do so we must start with what is loved. I wonder whether beginning with delight, before we tear apart and analyze, can help us more clearly imagine the possibilities of these systems as their best selves. And whether by doing so, we might navigate to a more perfect redemption.

I stood under the rosy arches of the Hagia Sophia twice in January: first with a Christian friend, then with a Muslim one. Their sharp intakes of breath, identically awed, reminded me of what I knew first about the Hagia Sophia before I tore it down in my own heart: Mystery and delight are at work in the world. The very stones will cry it out.

Every institution and system in which we participate is complicated. We do not have to kill what makes our hearts leap.