The sweet taste of honey suckle, the tiniest drop forming at the end of the stem once the sides have been scraped of the nectar. You can't feel the weightless liquid on the tip of your tongue but the sensation of sweetness swells, and just as quickly, dissipates. You pick another, and another, and soon two dozen wilting yellow and white flowers lay at your feet. Still you are not satisfied. Your tongue says, “Again! Again!” and you attend to it until the vine is stripped in pursuit of something elusive.
As a child, I wondered if I could milk each blossom into a spoon until I had enough to wash over all my tongue so the sweetness might linger longer than a millisecond, but I was never patient enough.
Once someone directly and repeatedly asked me the question, “What do you want?” I only felt exposed. Most of the time, I’m not sure, or I want contradictory things, or different things on different days, or straight up sinful things. The question when posed to me then assumed that my desires reveal my true self.
Matthew Lapine in his book The Logic of the Body points out a perspective on desires held in varying degrees among believers. He argues rather deftly that the idea that we have “true selves,” or an inner, unseen real person, is questionable. He cautions us against assuming spontaneous emotions and thoughts reveal a deeper reality. Our desires and emotions might reveal aspects about us that we must reckon with, he says, but they are not the one skeleton key to unlocking the mystery of who we really are.
Desires in Narrative Form
Rosaria Butterfield, in her book Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, uses narrative beautifully to speak of the hospitality that drew her desires toward Jesus. She once said, “I didn’t need to be converted to heterosexuality. I needed to be converted to Christ.” This is what relationships with a few Christians brought about for her. However, when we hold up extreme conversion stories like hers (lesbian college professor turned homeschooling pastor’s wife), we can lose sight of the middle ground where most people struggle to take one step at a time. We miss, perhaps even discredit, the subtle yet incomplete work of love. While Butterfield’s narrative seems to give us a neatly packaged story of healed desire, this has not been my experience. Most of the time, I wobble about on rather ambiguous, shadowed paths.
Wesley Hill’s Washed and Waiting, on the other hand, provides a narrative of what many have called “the not yet.” The story of his struggle with same-sex attraction as one committed to a traditional view of marriage left me in a messy, unfinished place. He admits he was young when he wrote this, but I don’t think it’s a fault. In fact, it is what I find most endearing. His desire seems less jaded by mounting years of frustration. So often the advice given to those who struggle with alcoholism, or dieters, or those who indulge in pornography, is that you should simply avoid temptation. If you don’t put yourself in a tempting situation, you won’t be tempted. However, his “temptation” faces him day in and day out; avoiding the source of temptation is impossible.
It’s important to read his book with the understanding that Wesley Hill is human like me instead of a as a case study in errant desire. His vulnerable exploration sets before us all of our own desires. It’s not just gay men and women committed to the traditional view of marriage who must contend with unfulfilled desires; barren women, fatherless children, those grieving the loss of loved ones, all know the pain of living without. His book opens this wound in all of us if we read it honestly.
I’ve desired to give birth to a daughter and experience natural childbirth. I long to experience true friendship and community. There are many other desires, some significant, that I know will never be satisfied in this life.
However, looking ahead to a life living with unmet desires, we might prefer to shrink back from desire altogether. To use an oft quoted C.S. Lewis line, we might choose to be content to play in the slums with mud pies if we know the magnificent shoreline is beyond our reach. Afterall, Jesus said “Woe to you who have had your fill, who are satisfied, in this life.” But maybe we need to be hospitable to our own unmet desires. Maybe we can invite them to live with us, even if uncomfortably, instead of casting them out.
What is Desire?
Is it really true, what C.S. Lewis diagnosed? That we are all far too easily pleased?
This brings up a point of debate among theologians. What is the nature of desire? Can all desires be traced back to something good? St. Augustine would say so. He was the one who famously declared, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until we find our rest in You.” In his Confessions, we see a person wrestling with his desire and concluding that nothing in his experience brought him rest for his restless heart. In expounding 1 John 3:2, he asks, “What then shall “we” be, when we shall see this? What is promised to us?” He admits he doesn’t know, and John didn’t have the words to tell us. So he exhorts the believer, “...because ye cannot at present see, let your part and duty be in desire. The whole life of a good Christian is an holy desire.” This is a bold declaration.
Do we, in agreement with St. Augustine, see our desires as good and God-given, whereas temptation is the urge to meet them in ways not intended for us? Or are there inherently evil desires, which we do well to pull out of our hearts by their bloody roots? I admit, I am not sure, but I think there is value in simply grappling with this question. Where is the root of desire, and is errant desire a head or a heart problem? Or could the problem with desire be the split itself, as I have heard others say, “I know God loves me” as they point to their head, “but I don’t really know God loves me” as they point to their heart.
Head or Heart?
On hikes, my dad would take the time to explain to me the concept of Fibonacci numbers, asking me to pause and count the petals on flowers or the spikes on leaves. I remember sitting in our driveway, the second highest point in Boyle County, KY, as he explained how the sun would sink near one tree in the summer, and near another in the winter, spending the days moving between these two points as the earth. It was never just the look of beauty. It was the math, theories, or physics behind it all that captured his attention. In his classroom, I learned to see.
Then there was my mother. Sweeter than southern iced tea, she invited me to walk in pure joy. She never hid her delight. Everything in nature seemed a wonderful mystery to her, and every menial task in the home an opportunity to sing and dance. I remember dancing around the kitchen with her and my younger sister as we cleaned up after lunch. Suddenly we froze as a jar of jelly she was tossing about shattered on the floor. The momentary pause was broken by a fit of laughter which led to cleaning up quite a mess together. Not a day went by, even the most difficult ones, when she didn’t express a child-like wonder. In her classroom, I learned to delight.
Many have said of me, “You are your father’s daughter.” Yet the tenderness and open delight of my mother always nudges at my heart. Both of them were teachers by vocation. She taught in elementary schools, while my father taught college level courses at times. Each of them brought to the world approaches that I will never shake, approaches that even now mix uncomfortably within me.
Discipling Desire
Most of my life, I believed the bullseye of well-aimed discipleship was the mind. I tried to walk the earth as a “thinking thing.” Afterall, Descartes did say “I think, therefore I am,” right? What we think is the most important thing about us, and as A.W. Tozer said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” In an elective course, Dr. Blair Smith had us confront and discuss this question. What is more important, head or heart? The argument boiled down to two statements: “You can’t love what you don’t know” and “You won’t know what you don’t love.” Needless to say, we did not reach a consensus.
I still treasure a book given to me by my mentor in college, Love Your God with All Your Mind. She must have seen something in this mess of a romantic and legalistic young woman that was inclined toward thinking well. Even today, some of my friends tease me with the fact that I can often withdraw into the “ether,” far above the dust of earth, and can’t quite figure out how to land my thoughts in real experience once they have taken off. But what if my search for truth is, as Matthew Lee Anderson writes in his book Called Into Questions, "the form our love takes in its intellectual mode..."?
My desires draw me toward something or someone. To want is to be moved. This is rooted in the word for “passions.” I have desires, yes, and these desires move me. But the truth is, many days, I am moving in the dimness of things that have not been revealed yet.
One of the most perspective-altering books I read, at the suggestion of John Piper in an online sermon, was The Expulsive Power of a New Affection by Thomas Chalmers. The short but thick treatise is based on the premise that “Nature abhors a vacuum.” He explains that you can’t just cleanse the heart of all that it loves and leave it empty. A heart will not abide desolation. I think James K. A. Smith would agree. He argues in his book You Are What You Love that we are not primarily thinking things, but loving things. Chalmers wants believers to know that the heart must be taught that the lesser loves we have for “drink and sex and ambition” fade into the background when we see that which is truly lovely. The seven-suns-brightness of God’s glory will eclipse all these lesser lights. God’s love “expels” all other loves from the heart. Love for God is like, to quote C.S. Lewis, abandoning your “mud pies in the slums” for the “holiday at sea.”
We all must hunger and thirst now, we all must weep comfortless, we all wander homeless, and we are all lonely castaways. We are traveling outside the camp. We are waiting for a kingdom of which we only taste hints like drops from honeysuckles. These hints leave us unsatisfied and longing for more. Maybe my desires don't reveal my true self. Maybe they simply reveal my longing for Truth.
This is a hard, and very good, place to be....
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