The Grace of Cultivated Desire

It would seem that 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.

C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”

Not nearly enough thought is given to the subject of desire. We take it for granted and give it as much consideration as our physical build or academic aptitude—important, no doubt, but a natural reality that simply is what it is. And by desire, I mean eros—that love which yearns for the beloved. The deepest longings of the heart. That which we want most and hunger for most passionately. That hunger so commonly associated with sexual desire that we rarely mean otherwise by erotic. Christianity, however, has an unfortunate yet understandable track record of fearing eros. Understandable because the devastations of disordered desire are manifest. But unfortunate because the history of saints’ lives and scripture itself are testament to the power of eros to draw us closer to God. In his magnum opus, Theology of the Body, John Paul II reminds us that the ancients regarded eros as that desire which draws us to truth, goodness, and beauty (47:2)—a motif that recurs everywhere from the writings of Augustine and Boethius to the films of Terrence Malick.

If God “shouts in our pains,” does He not call us in our desires? Is not every passionate yearning of the heart an opportunity to pour our heart out to God, a call to seek His face?

David Foucachon

In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis highlights a dynamic that every Christian has experienced at some point (if not frequently!) in their lives—that “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (91). So universal is this experience that the meaningful exhortation “Don’t waste your trials” can sound cliché. But there truly are no atheists in foxholes; our impulse to seek God in trouble is a design feature. I once found myself praying “Lord, why can’t you teach me to seek you with this kind of earnestness without the trial!” But He does teach us; if God “shouts in our pains,” does He not call us in our desires? Is not every passionate yearning of the heart an opportunity to pour our heart out to God, a call to seek His face?

That might be all good and well for things we think God deems important, like a future spouse or a job, but what about disordered desires? What about the desire to see that person who wronged you reap what they sowed, or that sexual desire towards someone you are not married to? Harkening back to Augustine, the church has always taught that evil is a privation of good, sin the ultimate counterfeit. But how often do we bring our bent desires to God, asking Him to reveal the good behind the counterfeit, and reorder our desires toward it? Is my desire for revenge the product of a wounded ego and a disordered desire for respect? Do we trust God enough to bring Him our disordered desires? Or are we afraid that if we ask for bread He will give us a stone?

Too often we don’t bring desires to God because we fear them. Perhaps we fear that our desires will not be fulfilled, so we suppress them to avoid the pain of disappointment. We might even mistake this kind of stoicism for godly contentment, but even a cursory reading of the Psalms reveals that this is not what biblical contentment looks like. Contentment is not the same thing as ultimate satisfaction. Even the marriage bed is not the final end of erotic desire. It’s a gracious feast, to be sure, a dipping of the toes into the infinite. But it points to something far greater than itself. Ultimate eros is not meant to be fully satisfied in this life.

Another reason we might fear desires is that they lead to emotions, and we know how fickle those can be, so we tell a narrative that pits emotions like passionate romantic love against other values like commitment, as if they were enemies. True enough, emotions make for a terrible compass and should not be allowed in the driver’s seat, but that in no way negates their importance. A man is morally responsible to steward his emotions and occasionally called to suppress them, but more often than not, emotions flow from desires, not the other way around. Yet far too little attention is given to the discipline of cultivating the desires that invariably give birth to those emotions. A man who has let his marriage grow cold cannot conjure intense romantic feeling through an act of the will any more than a spiritually slothful man can summon closeness to God. But he can cultivate desire, and that desire will bear the fruit of emotion concurrent with the direction of his desire.

Perhaps the most feared emotion of all is sexual arousal. And we don’t have to look far to see why. The death, destruction, and devastation left in the wake of sexual lust—disordered desire—is the stuff of proverbial tales. But rather than addressing the issue at its root—the desires of the heart (Mark 7:21)—many Christians take refuge in human rules and regulations which “…indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence” (Col. 2:23, niv). I know of Christian schools that openly embrace a policy of intentionally keeping teenage boys exhausted with intense extracurricular sports programs “so they don’t fall into sexual sin”. Other parents are horrified to discover the presence of nudity in works of classical art in various Christian curricula. The horror stems from the belief that it’s this outside cause for lust entering their home that will cause their children to sin. But that’s not where the lust comes from; it comes from the disordered desires of our first parents, present in the heart of every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve. And deep in those hearts, at the seat of desire, is the only place it can truly be addressed. If a young man cannot learn the virtue of disciplining his desires, then no matter how sheltered his upbringing, he will find himself “stumbled” by any and every hint of sexual beauty in the inherently sexual world that God created. Even if such sheltering were possible, it would be a far richer blessing to cultivate, discipline, shepherd, and channel desire for the sacramental beauty, weighty glory, and joyous responsibility of the marriage bed.

Throughout Scripture, from Song of Solomon to Hosea to Ephesians to Revelation, we encounter a recurring theme: sexual fidelity is about spiritual fidelity; eros is about ethos (Theology of the Body, 47:5). Fidelity is first and foremost about rightly ordering desires. It is about disciplining eros, not suppressing it. In both realms, spiritual and sexual, it will certainly include instances of abstaining or turning away from an unlawful end, but as one of my college professors was fond of saying, “God never turns you away from something without turning you toward something greater.” Fidelity is a fundamentally positive virtue that encompasses an active choice of the will to rightly order and cultivate desires. What do we owe God, and what do we owe our spouse? We owe our eros.

Works Cited

John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. Boston: Pauline, 2006.

Lewis, C. S., The Problem of Pain. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001.