In Praise of Pleasure

Happy Sunday! Enjoy whatever makes you happy!

When I was growing up Catholic, pleasure was one of those sticky issues. There were good pleasures and bad, ones that were acceptable, enjoyable even, that didn't require confession, and then there were the ones that were supposed to induce guilt, shame that one lacked control. When my cousin and I ran around naked, innocently so, like small children are wont to do, my grandmother would tut-tut and shake her head. "The Virgin Mary never touched herself!" she would mutter. The statement left me perplexed. I was only 6, 7, or 8 at the time and my cousin two years my junior. How did she clean herself off after using the bathroom? I would wonder.

I was also taught that there was a crowd of saints and dead people watching me from heaven. Never god himself, who, I was told, was too busy running the universe. God and Jesus could never be expected to answer prayers for this reason. Instead, we prayed to "intercessors" who could run off like good administrative assistants and tell god what was going on and take care of the small details like finding a toy (thank you, St. Anthony!).

Rather than comfort, this image of supernatural spying was a source of stress and worry. I was still learning which pleasures were good and which evil, and I wasn't perfect, being the sinful being I was. And one of the problems was, the decision to place one pleasure in the bad pile seemed arbitrary, so pleasure felt like a trap, and all these eyes were watching me, judging.

But basically, the Catholicism I was learning was against earthly, bodily pleasures. We were supposed to be preparing our spirits for the afterlife by imitating god in the here and now. Bodies were shameful; spirit was pure and good. The Virgin Mary embodied (ha!) all that we were supposed to aspire to.

Some Catholics seemed to have a work around. One of the nuns at my Catholic school would enter a rapturous state at the description of the torture Jesus felt during his ordeal: the beating, the crown of thorns, carrying the cross, being crucified. She seemed to swoon as she described Jesus' bodily mortification, and she could be counted on any time anyone did anything slightly naughty like answer with sarcasm, fall asleep in class, or daydream. Any small transgression would send Sister Carmelita into an indignant rapture of "What our lord and savior suffered" for our sins. She had the bloodiest poster of Jesus on the classroom wall, far bloodier than any Friday the 13^th, Halloween or other slasher flick. We were in 7^th and 8^th grade, and we thought it was all hilarious to the point we would provoke her to talk about Jesus on the cross. During lunch and recess we would snicker, sure she practiced self-flagellation.

Sister Carmelita had found a way to indulge her bodily pleasure while pretending it was all about the spirit.

I stopped really being Catholic sometime in high school, but the stigma of pleasure is something I still have to deal with decades later. That indoctrination still bubbles up in certain pleasurable situations. Now, I can analyze these feelings, identify them and try to rectify, just as I can feel the superstitious part of my brain tell me all manner of irrational fears.

I realize now that the title In praise of pleasure doesn't seem accurate, but to get to the praising, you need to remove the teaching that pleasure is bad. It's not just Catholics, either. There are so many groups and narratives that  push the message that the body is bad, the spirit is good.

I don't believe in any afterlife or spirit. This life is it, which is not to say that we should lose ourselves in a hedonistic frenzy. Pleasure can come from the results of hard work (physical or mental) as well as enjoying the passing joy of the moment. The point is to find a balance in life, figure out what we want, what pleasures are worth having, and as long we we're not hurting ourselves or others, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.