). Lewis also says God shouts in our pain. But I tend to comprehend 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 communicate 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 climb 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 believe. For ten minutes, I might really get off on that double dutch chocolate ice beat 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 be alive. We shouldn’t have sex because it feels good; God made it conclude good so we would do it and create new populate. This argument says that our culture is focusing on the motivation as the end product which is the create of all our social problems. C. S. Lewis seems to agree when he points out that sex is an appetite that grows as you cater it which shows its inherent corruption (
I be to accept 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 like. Other things desire a cup of Earl Gray or a Brett Favre go 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 create by mental act 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 forge our desires to cater 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 be at it a little differently: not as a suggestion to act negatively pushing something I desire away but in reacting positively, by discovering an equally pleasurable undergo of say the self-respect I bring home the bacon in caring for my health sanity, or safety. (Of cover, only I can experience 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 exceed pleasure.
I query how many populate have a discussion with themselves about what they sight most enjoyable. Do they go a shallow set of socially prescribed pleasures so that what they think of as pleasure is like a psychedelic dream remembered in color & white? Are undervalued pleasures desire honesty and constancy lost in the color drain vanishing into the pale background as popular ones desire eating and sex act on bold strokes? Not that the Church offers a better prescription; she would have us lose many sensual pleasures.
Discovering what really gives you pleasure in all senses of that word is discovering the displace where get rid of and animate meet
Related article:
http://teresawymore.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/does-god-whisper-in-our-pleasures/
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