We have looked at Need-love and Gift-love as two of the four kinds of love C.S. Lewis introduced us to and now the next two loves have to do with two kinds of pleasure. Let's see if there is a connection between our pleasures and our love.
The first pleasure is Need-pleasure. This is contentment we get from some of life's simplest treats - a refreshing glass of water, a comfortable chair or a cup of coffee.
As a person who has travelled quite extensively, its value is priceless when I am kilometers away from my familiar sights and sounds and I miss the delights that I enjoy so much from home.
Frederick Buechner – The Longing for Home
What was there about that house that made it home in a way that all the other houses of my childhood never even came close to being? The permanence of it was part of the answer—the sense I had that whereas the other houses came and went, this one was there always and would go on being there for as far into the future as I could imagine, with Ellen bringing my grandmother her glass of buttermilk on a silver tray just at eleven every morning, and my grandfather going off to his downtown office and returning in time for a cocktail before dinner with the evening paper under his arm and maybe something he'd bought at the bakery on the way home, and the Saturday night suppers when the cook was out and the menu, in honor of the New England half of my grandmother's background, was always mahogany-colored beans baked with salt pork and molasses, steamed Boston brown bread with raisins in it, and strong black coffee boiled in a pot with an eggshell to settle the grounds and sweetened with lumps of sugar and cream heavy enough to whip.
This is a classic expression of Need-pleasure – each enjoyment of it goes into the memory bank to be drawn upon when the opportunity comes to enjoy it as some other appropriate moment.
The second pleasure is Appreciation-pleasure. This is the pleasure that comes suddenly but leaves us enthralled in its wake – the brief flash of pleasure leaves us with both a longing and a lasting memory. Like
driving along a highway when, unexpectedly, around a bend in the road a field full of poppies comes into view.
Need-love, Gift-love; Need-pleasure, Appreciation-pleasure
- By needing and giving love, finding pleasure and appreciating pleasure, can we find the answer to loneliness?
- Is there a completeness in these four components?
- or is something still missing?
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