Sex & Your Body #3: Pleasure is Good
A Post from Dr. Kelly Edmiston
Last week, I began a series on Sex & Your Body: Reconnecting with Embodied Spirituality. For the introduction go HERE:
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To reclaim the body in Christian spirituality we must learn to view the body as a resource for knowing God, not a barrier between us and God. To do this, we must experience four primary values. By “experience,” I mean we learn them ourselves, recognizing which one feels difficult and gently exploring why. And we “experience” these values as we teach and talk about them with our children. The best way to do this is in the “coming and going” of life. We can talk about these values in the car as we drive to baseball games, at family dinner, or when we are tucking our kids in bed at night. The four values are:
1. I am my Body
2. My Body is Holy
3. Pleasure is Good
4. God is Everywhere
5. What I do with my body matters.
In order to develop a spiritual sexuality, we must teach our children that pleasure is a gift from God. The Bible says “Taste and see” that God is good (Psalm 34:8). With our kids, we can ask, what does God’s Goodness taste like then? What does God’s goodness look like? Did the ancient Christians understand something that we are missing? In our culture, we have a tenuous relationship with pleasure.
On one hand, we are pleasure seeking hedonists, avoiding pain/aging/death/suffering at all costs. The primary message of popular media is “If it feels good, do it.” And yet, collectively as Christians, we also fear pleasure. We distrust our desires, quickly deeming them of the “flesh.” The message in some Christian cultures is, “if it feels good, don’t to it.” And not just “don’t do it,” but avoid it, run from it, call it sinful, and suppress it. Somewhere between this hedonism and the denial of pleasure is a place of “tasting and seeing” the goodness of God.
We can only taste and see something through our senses. Imagine the taste of a juicy steak with a glass of red wine. Imagine the smell of your grandmother’s homemade pie baking in the home you grew up in. Imagine the sight of the sunset over the water at your favorite beach after a long day. These sensory experiences point us to the goodness of God. It is these precise experiences that show us what God’s goodness looks like, tastes like, and smells like.
Pleasure therefore is perceived through the senses. We receive pleasure through tasting, seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling the world around us. Your pleasure is God’s idea. Say that out loud to yourself right now. My pleasure is God’s idea. The pleasure we experience in sex is a result of our senses and this pleasure is a gift from God. Did you know the female clitoris has no biological or reproductive function? Women were created with a clitoris for their pleasure. Think about the sensuality of a sexual encounter between two committed partners. We use our smell, sight, hearing, taste, and touch to experience the full extent of sexual pleasure. The pleasures we experience in all of life are a result of what we see, smell, touch, feel, hear, and they are all gifts from God.
As we parent through the different ages and stages of our children, we want to communicate this over and over again in age-appropriate ways. We want our children to taste and see that the Lord is good. We want our children to know that pleasure is God’s gift to us and God wants us to have pleasure in sex and in ALL areas of our life. If we narrow pleasure to sex alone, we have significantly limited the pleasure available to us.
Try this: Take your child to experience something beautiful and pleasurable together. As you do, talk about pleasure as God's good gift to us. One set of parents I know took their 13-year-old daughter to a nice steakhouse on her birthday. The child loved steak and had never eaten at a nice steak house before. At dinner, mom and dad explained the different cuts of meat, how it is cooked, and the various side pairings. As they ate, they ate slowly. They took in every bite. They talked about pleasure as God’s idea. A dad of a 5-year old took his son to get ice cream. As they sat outside on a hot day, they ate their ice cream together. Dad said, “Isn’t it amazing how delicious ice cream is!” The son joyfully replied, “Yup! Delicious!” Dad said, “Did you know that ice cream and the pleasure it brings us is God’s idea!”
As you engage your child in this conversation, breathe in God’s love for you as you remind your self, pleasure is good.