On Desire

The Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity

O LORD, we beseech thee to keep thy Church and household continually in thy true religion; that they who do lean only upon the hope of thy heavenly grace may evermore be defended by thy mighty power; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

As the Articles of Religion affirm and as Scripture teaches us, God has gifted humanity with free will. A consequence of this free will is that we have desires. These are the forces within us that motivate us to act. Our desires can be either good or bad, either drawing us nearer to God or taking us away from him.

St Augustine of Hippo famously defined desire that draws us towards God, virtue, in terms of rightly ordered love. In On Christian Doctrine he famously expands on this meaning stating that:

love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.

To use the language of desire, we must use our free will to order our desires in order that we desire to be in the amount suitable to the object of that desire. Disordered desire is the root of sin. For instance, when we desire material wealth for ourselves over our desire for the well-being of our neighbours, it is easy to see how we might be willing to cheat them or otherwise allow our actions to negatively affect them in the pursuit of our own gain.

A clearer example comes from the consideration of the desire for social belonging. It is a fundamental motivator of all human behaviour to have belonging. In a modern Western context, that desire manifests in certain culturally conditioned patterns of behaviour which are normative for anyone who wants to fit in and be a part of society. It is perfectly natural and anyone would be hard pressed to suggest that in and of itself a desire to be a part of a group is sinful. Yet Christianity often challenges these cultural norms that form the basis of belonging. How often on a Sunday does a homily exegete a passage of Holy Scripture by expounding on how Christ is calling us to counter-cultural action? Suddenly our desire for God—to follow him, to honour him and to have intimate relationship with him, is placed in conflict with the desire to conform to the norms of society in order to fit in. If we place our desire to conform to the norms of society above our desire to follow God’s counter-cultural call, we have a disordered desire.

There are many hymns and modern praise songs that speak of turning ourselves wholeheartedly over to Christ. How many Christians, however, can upon reflection sing these lyrics in all sincerity? 

In the famous lyrics, “O Love that wilt not let me go, / I rest my weary soul in thee; / I give thee back the life I owe, / That in thine ocean depths its flow / May richer, fuller be,” we are promising to give back our lives to God who gave us life, yet that does not in practice seem to be what we do. We withhold our lives from God like Ananias and Sapphira withheld some of the profit from the sale of their property.  Our lips proclaim a desire to turn ourselves over to God, but our actions often show those words to ring hollow in our lives.

There is a disconnect between what we say we desire, what we say we love, and what we actually love. We have failed in most of our modern Christian lives, to cultivate a theology of desire, this place of rightly ordered desires that will maintain our orientation towards God.

It is helpful to think of this in terms of desire rather than love because often we view loves as something which we have no control over, and also because we associate love with the emotion of love far more than we ought to when considering the full spectrum of what love entails. With desire, it seems easier to draw that mental connection with our ability to control our desires.

This is where spiritual disciplines come in. It is through the use of spiritual disciplines that we can begin to cultivate Godly desires and suppress those or reshape those desires that are disordered. Spiritual disciplines are opportunities to practice intentional orientation of our desires in a way that we often wouldn’t consider to be the case in terms of love. When love is viewed as an emotion it means it cannot be controlled or shaped, simply experienced and actualized or denied. With desire, we can shape it because it is something more persistent.

Ultimately, when our desires are oriented towards God, they will move us towards him. When they remain disordered, however, they will move us away from him. Desires apart from God are never fully satisfied, however, as they are ultimately self-satisfied. CS Lewis makes this point when he argues that pride is the great sin from which all other sin derives because it explicitly involves placing ourselves in the place of God. As we are created with a desire and that desire can only be fulfilled by God, it becomes a clear implication that when we follow these disordered desires we will always be left wanting more.

Spiritual disciplines that are useful for the reorientation of our desires include the cultivation of gratitude and thankfulness. This might be as simple as beginning your morning in a prayer of thanksgiving for how you are thankful for a day of opportunity that God has brought you to (the collect for grace from Morning Prayer is a suitable starting point for this) to creating gratitude lists: identifying throughout your day all the things you are grateful to God for. 

The confession from Morning Prayer reminds us that, “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,” and is a lesson that St Paul reminds us of. In Romans 1. 21 Paul describes how the lack of gratitude towards God for who he is and what he has done is the root of humanity’s descent into guilt and the disordering of humanity’s desires. To return to Godly desires, we need to consider why we got there in the first place and then continue to practice this culture of gratitude in order to strengthen the correctly ordered desires.

It is through this development of a clear theology of desire that we find ourselves drawing closer and closer to God.