Stop Two: Perth Australia - Joy, Pleasure, Fear, and Guilt

I arrived in Perth, Australia Tuesday evening, December 14, in order to attend and present at a conference of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. It is a rather small conference with less than 100 people attending and most of us are staying in a dormitory at St. Catherine’s College across the road from the University of Western Australia, which is the location for the conference sessions. The “U-Wah” campus is spectacular with Spanish Mediterranean architecture and tropical foliage full of beautiful birds.

Such a small conference is a great opportunity to meet new people. I have made the acquaintance of scholars from across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Pakistan, Canada, Japan, and the Netherlands. I spent my first full day here with two new friends, Genny Blades from Victoria and Michael Newton from Newfoundland, taking a bus to Freemantle, then a ferryboat to Rottnest Island several miles off the west coast into the Indian Ocean. The government used the island at one time to quarantine aboriginal peoples. Now it is a vacation location. We rented bicycles and spent the afternoon touring the beautiful yet harsh island. It was a wonderful time enjoying breathtaking views, wading in the ocean, and being conscious of the need to ration drinking water.

It is a joyous occasion to make new friends that I hope to meet again at some point in the future. Introducing myself to a total stranger is something that comes pretty easy to me and I can strike up a conversation with most anyone. It is much more difficult for me to take advantage of pleasurable opportunities that arise and which may never present themselves again. Michael and I are going to attend a U2 concert here in Perth tomorrow evening. I have never paid as much to attend a concert as I have for this one, but it is a wonderful opportunity that I am sure I will always remember. This opportunity and my hesitation to incur the expense gave me pause to consider my long-term hesitance to pursue, embrace, and enjoy pleasure.

I remember hearing a sermon as a teenager in which the preacher was speaking about the terrible lack of morals in society and how it was summed up in a popular phrase at the time “If it feels good, do it”. The preacher deplored the phrase as irresponsible, shallow, and that such an attitude would surely lead to the downfall of society. The implication being, at least in my young impressionable mind, that if it feels good, it must be wrong, it must be sinful, to be resisted at all costs. I know that I am not alone in having such a predisposition about pleasure imprinted upon my mind. The religious tradition of my upbringing and in the Puritan heritage of our nation, was and is serious business. I grew up believing that opportunities for pleasure should be treated with suspicion because the devil used such opportunities to lead us astray and the next thing you know you are spending eternity in hell.

I have observed and experienced this repressive religious attitude about pleasure having a negative impact on marriage. Money and sex are usually cited as the two leading causes of marital strive, but both of those are rooted in pleasure, or more precisely, the inability to cherish pleasure, to be spontaneous, to throw caution to the wind, to take a chance, to let go, to lose control, and just live in the moment. Even more troublesome is when this inability turns into fear of spontaneity, fear of losing control, and feelings of guilt following pleasurable experiences.

I am not versant in the religious origins for the repression of pleasure but I am generally aware of the conflict as old as human history between the fertility oriented religions and the male-dominated dualistic religions. So this is nothing new and it is certainly not a unique problem, but I am turning a page in my life not only to embrace opportunities for pleasure, but to actively seek them out, to live, laugh, and love as never before. It is not a simple nor easy step and I will probably need a helpful push now and then to continue in this direction; also, I am not advocating the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake at the expense of responsibility, but it is a necessary step in the pursuit of a healthy balance.