Many of us suffer from struggle to healthily enjoy pleasure without guilt, to not feel guilty about feeling good, to not be apologetic about our good luck.

Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Instead, we tend, however unconsciously, to associate depth and religion with what’s grey, sad, broken,  and melancholy. In the name of depth and religion we are stoic rather than joyous in our acceptance of pleasure. Many of us, suffer from an existential incapacity to drink in life’s more earthy pleasures in genuine delight. Instead, we always nurse some inchoate guilt feelings about pleasure.

And so, we have certain unspoken religious axioms by which we live: If it hurts more, it’s better for you! Beauty is a pagan luxury. The Gospel calls us to an austerity of body and spirit. A truly deep person does not thoroughly enjoy a pleasure, especially a bodily one. Reticence and anxiety in the face of deep pleasure is healthy spiritually. Jesus’ challenge was much more about renunciation than about drinking in deeply the life that God offers us.

But this psychological and religious inhibition exists in all cultures and is not a particularly Christian problem. Too many people blame guilt feelings on their religious training when, in fact, their roots lie far beyond and outside of religion. This isn’t a “Christian neurosis”; it’s a human one. In all cultures and in all religions, most sensitive adults suffer from a certain chronic depression, namely, they find it hard to simply delight in life without at the same time feeling the shadows around that momentary delight.

And so, like the people at table with Jesus on that night when a woman broke an expensive jar of ointment on his feet, cried on his feet, and dried his feet with her hair, pleasure does not sit comfortably with us. Rather, in the face of raw pleasure, we shift about uncomfortably and give reasons why it shouldn’t be happening.

That’s acceptable, but we should not try to rationalize this neurotic reticence in the name of Jesus, Christianity, religion, or depth of soul.

Authentic religion brings us a double challenge: Be prepared to renounce life – and be prepared to enjoy it!

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