A Guilty Pleasure
I have a confession to make: I have an addiction. It’s such a wonderful pleasure, I can’t imagine giving it up and I quickly start to miss it if I’m unable to get my fix. It gives me the most wonderful high, unlike anything else that I have experienced. It’s like I drift into another world for a while, where nothing else matters. I am unable to resist — once I had experienced this for the first time, I just couldn’t stop. The feel of it is amazing — the slide of the water over my body, the sensations of my own body moving through it, and the high afterwards — I’m just on the ceiling.
You are probably currently thinking that I need help. Well, it’s not as bad as it sounds. My guilty pleasure is, in fact, swimming. Generations of Christians have denounced many ‘pleasures of the flesh’ — I’m here to speak in their defence. How does one defend ‘pleasures of the flesh’? Take my opening paragraph. It sounds sinful, until you learn that my addiction is something that is, in fact, good for you, something that health experts are constantly telling us we should be getting more of, and which has innumerable benefits. So how can it be wrong?
The Christian God is a god of love. How could such a God forbid us from enjoying ourselves? There are many references in the Gospels that stress the fact that Christians should focus on the next life, not this one. We should be building up riches in the next life, not in this one. And yet, Christ says that to enter the kingdom of heaven we should be like children.
One of the amazing talents of children that it is easy to lose in adulthood is constant wonder at the world. Children see beauty in many more places than their jaded elders. Is this something Christ wanted us to cultivate? Look out of the window now. Is what you see outside beautiful? No? Look again.
It is wonder at the world and its beauty that keeps my faith going. If ever you struggle to pray, try watching a David Attenborough programme, reading the first chapters of ‘The Selfish Gene’ by Richard Dawkins or eating a tasty home-cooked meal.True pleasures can bring us alive. When the sun comes out it brightens up our day, and I find cooking to be therapeutic. I can gain pleasure out of a friend’s smile, a good beer, a favourite song, a good swim or a job well done — these things help keep me healthy and happy, and all are a part of the wonder that is God’s Creation. It is those things that we believe give us pleasure, and in fact cause us or others harm, that should be avoided. There is a distinction between a connoisseur and a glutton; a beer-lover and an alcoholic, and to harm the world around us, or our own bodies, which are not given but are on loan, is surely a sin.
This, I guess, is the secret to defending the ‘pleasures of the flesh’. If you do not seek out pleasure for pleasure’s sake, but appreciate and enjoy the things around you and the experiences you have as beautiful and pleasurable, and in all these things you see God’s craftsmanship, then pleasure can be not sinful, but worshipful.
Picture: chronicity via flickr.com