Desire

 

Is my greatest desire merely my own self-preservation and gratification? To rephrase this question, can I desire for something greater? Furthermore, how great can my desires become- what is the upper limit of desire?

Caroline Polachek struck something in me with her album a few years back called "Desire, I Want to Turn Into You". The album is very sensual, and also very tasteful in its sensuality, yet nobody could accuse it of being reserved. The cover features the singer crawling on all fours through a train car with an expression of deep yearning and mystique on her face. She could be on her daily commute, yet she looks far past the camera and her hands find a fringe of sand upon which a red dotted line leads past the frame, like a treasure map, an imaginative whiff of adventure nestled within the everyday. It's a perfect image of the reconciliation between our longing for the divine and our temporal confines within the mundane.

Isn't that the best we can do this side of the grave, to strive to become desire itself? Not blind desire, but a pointed one, a ravenous desire for the eternal things, the treasure map which spurs man on in adventure?

To have desire is to have something more primal than hope. It's to recognize a pang of need within oneself which drives one toward that which will satiate it. It is to have thirst which drives one's will to attain that which will quench it. It's a "lower" motivation, or rather an intuitive motivation rather than an intellectual one.

As a deer longs for running streams...

Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes...

Desire comes from de - sider which is a Latin for "from the stars". It's a need which comes from the stars themselves, a primal intuition, a craze, which can no less be continually grown and pruned to lead us toward holy things.

In considering its roots in the stars, desiring is not unlike dreaming. In the film "Inception", the characters are pinned down in a warehouse within someone's dream, and one of the guys is having trouble fending the attackers off with his rifle, while another guy says to him "You musn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling"...and then he raises a grenade launcher to his eyes and fends them off. In the same way, am I afraid to desire a little bigger, darling? And what would it mean for my desires to grow past charted waters?

Because I notice that problems arise when my own desire fails to extend beyond the bounds of myself. A human desire whose highest expression is bounded by their own wellbeing will languish. It is like an old houseplant whose fronds have browned and flattened and withered and putrified. There is a lack of oxygen upon which those desires can feed. And they fold in on themselves, and compress and die.

But the very minute I begin to desire something good for my neighbor, that little houseplant has new life breathed into it again. I can start to feel alive in my desire, like my own consciousness has room and oxygen to grow and project into the world, rather than being bound up in the grasping singularity of self-interest, that black hole which by all accounts seems to annihilate all desire.

Perhaps self-interest is actually the enemy of desire. We can cultivate desires for so many beautiful things outside ourselves. We can desire health for our families. We can desire good things for our friends. We can desire the conversion of our cities, we can desire the transformation of hearts. We can desire the cross. We can desire the resurrection. We can desire the great return of our King, and all the fullness of everlasting joy beyond. We can desire desire itself. We can even want to want, when we otherwise couldn't bring ourselves to want in the first place. We don't even need matches or a source of fuel to enkindle desire- we just need to allow space for it to well up from the Spirit.

Now, the desires bound by the self are either concrete or irrelevant in the eyes of the world. If I desire a cookie for myself, I can eat it and be satiated. I can save up money to buy a sports car if a sports car is what I desire. But if we're honest with ourselves, nobody just wants a cookie or a sports car, and even these desires are never by themselves- they are always intermixed with bigger desires that cannot be filled by the material. The problem is, immaterial desires have no final fulfillment this side of the grave. So what is their purpose? And how can they be expressed?

We who have felt these desires and have diligently sought their fulfillment know the answer. And the answer is prayer. 

When good desires well up within, they are very naturally and easily converted into prayer. Most of the time they really have no where else they can go except for prayer. In fact, desire may just be the primary food and fuel of prayer. If there are no desires, how can there be any draw, how can there be any salt of the earth, how can there be any relational expression and interchange between ourselves and God?

Worldliness has no conception of a desire which can extend past the realm of the self. And it certainly does not offer any outlets for this type of desire. What use is desire, anyway, in the eyes of the world, if there is no prayer to express it? If a person for a moment experiences desire outside of themselves, especially a desire for something infinite, and they do not turn to prayer, then they have to constantly bottle these feelings, let them slowly burn out and die. In a purely materialistic system, almost all great desires we have must be suppressed, for they have no fulfillment.

“The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

We who have prayer can have no fear of great desires welling up within us. We know what to do with it. And we have fullness in our ability to express desire and operationalize it toward real, good ends. We pray, and our prayers are heard and answered by the Most High. Reality changes, merely because our desires are allowed to spill over into our prayer.

And the crown of our desire is hope, true Christian hope. It is what happens when we become desire itself, and the highest desire, to see the face of God. It is the perfection of all our desires into something truly transcendent and which is only allowed to exist out of the work of the Divine. This side of the grave, hope seems hopelessly fragile because it feels so impossible to hold while this world still roils in sin. But it's real and it satiates us indeed, because it's the meeting point between our desires for Him, and His desires for us.