Something about Desire

by Rob Goodale

I’ve spent most of this Lenten season trying to understand desire. It’s exhausting -- rarely is my mind quiet, rarely is my spirit still. I observe within myself a constant longing, like a dull roar, for some unnamed thing whose face is ever-so-slightly obscured. I want, is what I’m saying, and I don’t even know what I want, only that I want it. The clearer the picture becomes, the less certain I am.

I am certain, however, that most of the time the object of this desire is not Our Lord. Most of the time He is a welcome guest, invited to observe or maybe participate sparingly but certainly not more than would be polite. I’m not proud of this.

I’m even less proud of my response when I find these unspecific desires are not easily satisfied (because of course they’re not, I can’t even figure out what I’m desiring). A mature and reasonable person would greet such a predicament with tranquil realism, adjusting some aspect of his life in order to feel less anguish.

I am not a mature and reasonable person.

Most of the time, the unsatiated desire within makes me want to kick and scream and throw things, to throw a tantrum the likes of which have not been seen in decades. I want to storm into a room in the middle of a rant and slam the door behind me, frightening everyone. I want to break every plate and bowl and glass in a Williams Sonoma storefront. I want to emit deranged screams so disturbing that no one who hears them will be able to sleep for a week. I want to cause some real destruction, is what I’m saying.

I obviously can’t do those things. And so instead I ask the Holy and Righteous One to kill the desire, to take it away from me, to replace it with placid indifference, detached from needing anything or anyone to fill me up. He may do this, in time, but it does not seem to be high on His to-do list.

And so instead of being destroyed, the desire persists. And so instead of kicking and screaming and throwing things, I try to understand myself better.

A little more than two years ago, Jenny (who writes for the Restless Hearts, a very good blog) gave me a book by Caryll Houselander called The Reed of God, and because I’m the sort of human who is never reading fewer than four books at a time, I am still reading it. God seems to have a way of working through the books I read -- I am constantly in awe of the way I seem to stumble into exactly what I need to hear. Which brings me to Houselander’s words on desire:

“In every man the impulse and desire to pursue his happiness, his own good, is deeply rooted. It is a universal drive and drag toward what is good for him which dominates every man born. This equality of desire makes every man search, makes everyone (whether he knows it or not) seek, seek, seek all his life for the lost Child.” (Houselander, The Reed of God, p. 120)

She sees something that I have only begun to glimpse, something that Pope Benedict XVI wrote about extensively in his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est: desire is the great engine, the coal-burning furnace within each person that drives them to respond to the Love that spills over into the entire world.

Desire isn’t bad; without desire I would be listless, a boat without an oar, completely at the mercy of the sea. The trouble comes when I set my course wrongly. Trying to fill the God-shaped hole in me with anything that is not God -- food, books, money, other people -- is like pouring whiskey into the gas tank. It may seem like it’s going to work, and if you didn’t know any better it might seem right, but in the end it’s just going to destroy your car and waste a lot of good whiskey.

My literary spirit animal, C.S. Lewis, described this problem with startling precision:

“Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” (Lewis, The Weight of Glory)

My desires, be they for notoriety or intimacy or meaning or pleasure, are all, at their core, desires for relationship: to know and be known. At the heart of who I am is a desire to love and be loved. What I need is not for this desire to be taken away, but made stronger, firmer, more dialed in. What I need is to learn to see God in everything, not sometimes, but all the time, and to glorify God by learning how to love better.