Pleasure is one of the ways God speaks to us. As C.S. Lewis writes, God whispers to us in our pleasure (The Problem With Pain). Lewis also says God shouts in our pain. But I tend to hear a lot of shouting during the pleasure, too. Anyway, that’s really what this blog is about — finding God in our pleasure.
There are two ways of experiencing pleasure: one as sensation and the other as emotion. When people talk about pleasure, they don’t usually distinguish which kind they mean, as if they’re the same. But is the pleasure from eating a delicious meal the same kind of thing as the pleasure from watching your children laugh? Both feel good, one on your skin, the other, your heart. I think we go wrong when we don’t distinguish between the two, because it’s the recognition of the difference that gives us the ability to know when we’re fooling ourselves.
I’m all for “if it feels good, do it.” Believe me. But we have two “feels” to consider. For ten minutes, I might really get off on that double dutch chocolate ice cream, but for two days afterward, I’ll be depressed about my weight. So, have I experienced pleasure or not? Sex with my neighbor’s wife is a few hours of ecstasy, but months of anxious deception isn’t. So, have I experienced pleasure or not? Of course that’s pleasure, you say, but it’s just the price we pay – a few moments of pain as payback for our moment of pleasure. Are you really that cynical?
One of the appeals to reason from Catholic sexual morality is that pleasure is not a goal but a motivation. For example, we shouldn’t eat because it’s pleasurable; God made it pleasurable so we would do it and stay alive. We shouldn’t have sex because it feels good; God made it feel good so we would do it and create new people. This argument says that our culture is focusing on the motivation as the end product, which is the cause of all our social problems. C.S. Lewis seems to agree, when he points out that sex is an appetite that grows as you feed it, which shows its inherent corruption (Mere Christianity). It seems we must be cautious in following our pleasures.
I tend to agree that pleasure is how God coaxes us where she wants us to go, but pleasure is exceedingly individual. Some things we can all appreciate, like water when we’re thirsty or seeing the face of one we love. Other things, like a cup of Earl Gray or a Brett Favre pass, appeal to some and not others. I don’t think you can generalize an activity as broad as sexual behavior and an experience as specific as sexual pleasure into a few “shouldn’t” statements, especially ones that contrive to invalidate the pleasures of entire classes of people.
If God is speaking to us through our pleasures, then she speaks to us individually. The trick is not to mould our desires to meet other people’s ideas of morality but to really recognize our own. If you’re settling for sensual pleasures at the expense of emotional ones, or vice versa, or if you’re sacrificing your own pleasure for the sake of someone else’s morality, you’re not being true to yourself, to your own conscience, to God. You’re being immoral.
I can agree with Lewis’s warning about the sexual appetite, but only if I look at it a little differently: not as a suggestion to react negatively, pushing something I desire away, but in reacting positively, by discovering an equally pleasurable experience of, say, the self-respect I achieve in caring for my health, sanity, or safety. (Of course, only I can know what’s best for my own health, sanity, and safety.) If God uses pleasure to get us to do what’s good for us, then avoiding pleasure is really unGodly — unless you’re choosing a better pleasure.
I wonder how many people have a discussion with themselves about what they find most enjoyable. Do they follow a shallow set of socially prescribed pleasures, so that what they think of as pleasure is like a psychedelic dream remembered in black & white? Are undervalued pleasures like honesty and constancy lost in the color drain, vanishing into the pale background as popular ones like eating and sex take on bold strokes? Not that the Church offers a better prescription; she would have us white-out many sensual pleasures.
Discovering what really gives you pleasure, in all senses of that word, is discovering the place where flesh and spirit meet
Filed under: religion, sex | Tagged: c.s. lewis, catholic, morality
