The Slow Way: On Holy Pleasure

Jesus demands a bigger, truer pleasure. The kind that wakes up our whole selves — our desires, our bodies, our moral-courage, our self-giving love.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

This past week at youth group we took a few Bible stories and—through the miracle of ChatGBT— repackaged them into scripts. Then we did some table reads. My favorite was the story of Jesus’s first documented miracle in the Gospel of John, turning water into wine. I found the descriptions of the AI-generated narrator hilarious: “the smell of lamb and herbs wafted through the garden party, mixing with the jasmine scented air.” (Thanks ChatGBT!)

But mostly I liked coming back to a story I know and that most of our teenagers know: Jesus hesitates to perform a miracle, his mom pressures him, he gives in, and then he uses his miracle powers to do something that doesn’t save any souls or bodies, doesn't feed any hungry people (wine is not necessarily nourishing, y’all), or restore anyone’s mental health. In fact, this miracle could easily be written off as hedonistic and pleasure seeking. And maybe it is.

Jesus chose the giant containers of purification water to perform his miracle, jars of water that the Law of Moses would have required folks to use for ritual washing, a cultural necessity that would allow the guests of the wedding to be purified enough to observe a religious ceremony, purified enough to eat. He transforms the very tools the people would have used to make themselves good enough, and instead chooses to free the purification jars from their moral duty. He turns them into vessels of pleasure. You might even say his miracle is for the sake of the party, in opposition (at least on paper?) to the purity of the people around him. 

What is that story about? I wonder if it might be a story of how true pleasure, authentic happiness, and even delight might be the more powerful way toward a life of meaning than any puritanical notions of keeping ourselves free of moral failure. It’s the equivalent of turning the purification tools into wine-filled jars. What if true pleasure leads us to true faith? 

I recently listened to a conversation between Ezra Klein and Jia Toliento about children and screen time, particularly the ways YouTube children’s shows creators (CoComelon, for example) have deliberately crafted their shows to manipulate the attention spans and pleasure centers of a young child’s brain.

As they started the conversation Tolentino and Klein began to discuss their experiences as parents and their concerns around the addictive nature of our devices. If you’ve ever engaged with Jia Tolentino’s work, you’ll find that she’s brilliant and boundary pushing. The few times I have listened to her interviews or read her essays I’ve reacted with big feelings. Her words get under my skin. Then I try to move past what she’s written or said, and find myself coming back to her words again and again thinking, What if she got that right? 

Their conversation started with a simple enough question: Why did each of them choose to have kids? I felt deeply uncomfortable with Tolentino’s answer: “The idea [of having children] seemed scary and overwhelming . . It was like, Oh this is gonna last for so long, there’s going to be part of it that is so intense and so difficult. And I didn’t do it until I felt like… ‘I think it will be fun. On the whole, I think it will be fun.’ I felt that there would be real, lasting, kind of destabilizing, boundary dissolving pleasure in it, that would kind of scare me in the way that true pleasure…does. . . I don’t think I understood that really the thing that drove me to this is probably the thing that drives me to a lot of things, which is pleasure-seeking.” 

Ezra Klein saw it differently: “I have this discomfort with the discourse around fun in parenting, as if the way to measure any experience in your life is whether…you’re having a lot of fun doing it…What attracted me to parenting…is that I want meaning in my life. What is a more fundamental sense of human meaning than continuing the human chain?”

Jia Tolentino responded with this: “What I think of as ‘fun’ is much less like ‘enjoyment’ and more like pushing the limits of what I can stand or am capable of…I have an arduous sense of fun.” Then she defined “fun” as this sense of pleasure that comes very close to meaning. 

My inner puritanical ego lit up at her description of parenthood as being something we attempt because we desire fun. Of course we don’t do it for our own fun! And for the past week since listening to this podcast, I’ve run that idea through all my filters: the part of me that turns words around, the part of me that wants us to be honest with myself about joy and motivation, the part of me that is healing from the bits of religion that taught me to ignore my body, my longings, or what delights me. The part of me that holds ideas up to the teaching of Jesus. Why did I have kids? 

The more I consider that question, the more I have to admit that there was real pleasure seeking in it for me as well. I had a pretty clear head on my shoulders. I didn’t imagine it would be easy. My moral compass was tuned to giving away my comfort and time for the sake of others, so I went into the care of children with a sense that it wouldn’t be about me. But also, I wanted to rock a baby, I wanted to make cookies with a little one who belonged  to me. I wanted a big grown boy who would hug me from behind while I stirred supper. I wanted to cheer at soccer games, to help with science projects. I wanted a family and a family culture that I helped create. 

Those of us in the Christian tradition are most often taught to at least pretend that we didn’t have selfish reasons for the big life choices we’ve made. But ignoring pleasure can have disastrous effects. Look at addiction and how pleasure becomes misshapen, seeping into a human life sideways. Look at the ways sex is so often used to control, abuse and manipulate human bodies made in the image of God. Look at how our longings for comfort lead to greed, the pursuit of pleasure at the cost of social equity. 

The more I have turned Tolentino’s statement around, the more I have come to a place of agreement. There is something to this pleasure thing. Good pleasure. Let’s call it meaning, authentic human happiness, wholeness. Pleasure is a signpost that points to the good life. Maybe our problem as humans is not that we are too stuck on our own pleasure, it’s that (I’m stealing from C.S. Lewis here) we don’t take pleasure seriously enough. 

What would happen if we begin to take our longing for pleasure so seriously that we care for our bodies, that we treat sex and sexuality with the dignity and honor it deserves, that we shape our working lives around joy, and our resting lives around joy? What if even in our most profoundly difficult moments of raising children, being in relationship, or living out our careers we are motivated by a holy pleasure? 

Is that something we can find when our children break our hearts? Can holy pleasure still be our core motivator when a spouse has died? Is holy joy present when the diagnosis is devastating? 

I’m not sure I buy Tolentino’s definition of fun, but I am on board with the idea that there is a kind of pleasure that comes very close to meaning. 

How do we live into a faith that insists on a better pleasure than bored comfort, than the never-ending ease of our TikTok algorithms, our relationships that fail to be vulnerable and compassionate? How do we begin to demand real, authentic, holy pleasure?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. But I find them profound. And I find that Jesus is always in the business of calling us to his way, a way that will totally ruin our comfort seeking, surface level naval gazing. He demands a bigger, truer pleasure. The kind that wakes up our whole selves — our desires, our bodies, our moral courage, our self-giving love. 

A Slow Practice

How do we begin to discern the difference between comfort seeking and true pleasure? 

The 6th century Irish missionary Columbanus said it this way: “If you want to understand the Creator, seek to understand Created things.” 

So, with Columbanus’s words in mind, I suggest we begin by paying attention to the created things that give us pleasure. Perhaps you’re like me and are recovering from a summer of eating and eating and eating. Vacation Micha eats with all her heart. Fall Micha tries to get her family back on a routine of healthy and simple meals. Last night when I announced we were having tofu salad for dinner, even the animals audibly sighed. Not quite as fun as french fries.

But as much as my eating in the summer was fun, sometimes it was simply excess. I know the difference between paying attention to the delicious tastes of a food I rarely get to enjoy, and stuffing my face with french fries because I can. 

Today, I’m going to invite you to prayerful eating, being aware of what you’re tasting, allowing it to remind you of the Creator. 

So here’s a guide for you:

Choose something simple, a piece of fruit, a salad, or a fresh slice of bread, and use your meal time (especially if you have the opportunity to eat alone) to consider all that grew to make this food possible and to the tastes that light up your mouth. What had to happen to plant and harvest this food? What do you taste? Does the taste of this food stir up any memories? Even if it’s not the most wonderful food you’ve tasted, what about the taste of this food brings joy? 

While you finish eating, take a moment to thank the One who created this food. Here’s a prayer:

I bless the pleasure of this food, Lord. 

I bless the pleasure of this moment. 

Teach me to pay attention to life’s quiet joy.

Teach me to pay attention to the gifts of pleasure.

Amen.

An Announcement about The Slow Way Podcast:

During my break this summer, I made the decision to stop releasing new episodes of The Slow Way Podcast. I have loved creating this podcast. (Did you know that in my imagination The Slow Way was a podcast long before it was a newsletter?) This is a wild stat: Only 5.81% of podcasts make it to 100 episodes! I promised myself when I started this podcast that I wouldn’t consider stopping until we hit that benchmark. It happened this past July, and I’m very proud of my little project. But the truth is that the gap between how many people read this Substack, and how few listen to the podcast has revealed where I should invest my time and energy. It’s time for me to put those resources somewhere else. 

You’ll notice that I’ll be trying some things out this fall around here. I hope to spend more time offering extra essays behind the paywall for my Slow Waysters that feature interviews with some of the authors of books I’ve written about here, reviews of some of my favorite fiction books, and general links to people on the internet doing great things. 

For those of you who have loved the podcast, all 101 episodes will still remain available! Feel free to go back and listen again. I am also going to try some new things, perhaps posting videos on Instagram of me leading the slow practice from this letter every Sunday. 

All that to say, please reach out! Tell me what you enjoyed about the podcast and I’ll do my best to find alternative ways through Substack and Instagram to offer you some good resources. 

And, as always, if you have ideas or hopes for my Slow Waysters paid subscription, or any other feedback, I’m always happy to hear from you. Just reply to this email. :) 

And look for the final Slow Way Podcast, dropping this Tuesday. 

One more note: When I first published this letter, I misspelled Jia Tolentino’s name as “Toliento”. Apologies, everyone!