We have spent some time in the last few posts exploring questions that we don’t often consider, but they are questions that are very important. Who am I, who are we, as human beings? How am I called to be in this world? Is there something about me that I share in common with everyone else?
These questions are important because they give shape to how we order our lives. The answers tell us how we can live well. They tell us the obstacles that get in the way of living well. They tell us how we move beyond these obstacles to a life of deeper meaning.
I think, therefore I am. You are what you think.
I believe therefore I am. You are what you believe.
I love, therefore I am. You are what you desire.
All three of these are a part of every person. But is one more foundational than the other? Can one be a lens through which we see and give shape to the rest of our lives? I believe that seeing ourselves through the lens of love/desire can be transformational.
What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking or believing beings, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers (people of desire)?
What if the center and seat of the human person is found not in the heady regions of the intellect but in the gut-level regions of the heart? How would that change how we saw ourselves? How we saw the people around us? How would that change how we saw ourselves as followers of Christ? How would that change our experience of discipleship?
Christian formation is not about absorbing and playing with ideas and information. It is not about clarifying beliefs. It is about formation of hearts and desires.
We talk about spiritual or faith formation. But what, exactly, are we forming with Christian formation? Minds…beliefs…ideas…or hearts and desires?
One of the early church fathers, Irenaeus, said that “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Sit with those words for a moment. Being fully alive is not just a suggestion or a good idea. It is an expression of the glory of God. This makes sense, as we have already explored how desire is an essential part of the nature of God.
So being fully alive is giving expression to the image of God that lives within us. These words paint a dynamic picture. To be human is to be for something, directed toward something, oriented toward something. As one person has said, “We are like existential sharks; we have to move to live.”
So what would seeing ourselves through the lens of desire look life?
What difference would it make in how we shape our living? What difference would it make in how we see and live with others? I don’t have a blueprint that includes five steps to living a life of desire. Instead, I will offer some wonderings, some ways that I have seen it change me.
First wondering: What if the center of the ultimate orientation is the heart?
I’m not talking about the heart as the place of our emotions and feeling. The Bible speaks of the heart as the seat of our longings and desires. It is the deep place from which all of our actions emerge. It is the fulcrum of your most fundamental longings, a visceral, subconscious orientation to the world. It is not just that I know some end or believe in some end. I long for some end.
Second wondering: Is the life of discipleship about aligning our will with God’s will? Or is it about aligning our desires with God’s desires?
Do we discern God’s will for our lives, and then do it? Or do we discern God’s desire for our lives, and then, seek to give expression to them? We have a decision to make about an action or direction in our lives. From the perspective of God’s will, there is a right choice among all the choices before you. From the perspective of desire, there is a choice that will, in this simple moment, give expression to the life that God desires for us.
Third wondering: What if a lot of the challenge of spiritual formation is about exploring how desire can become disordered.
What if it is primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions—our visions of the good life—and not merely about using our thinking and our believing to figure out God’s will? What if the primary goal of discipleship is the transforming of our imagination?
There are some who would say that desires must be eliminated. But if desires are foundational to who we are, they can’t be eliminated. At some basic level we know that, so we try to control it. But we end up spending a lot of energy on keeping desire under control. But as you come to the end of your life, do you want your eulogy to be, “Well, he did a good job of controlling his desires?”
So instead of controlling it, we try to figure it out. This is where “you are what you think” and “you are what you believe” can feel helpful. You use your mind, your ideas, your beliefs to see what these desires are and where they come from. Then, you will know what to do with them.
But with all these efforts to control and understand, you end up crying out the way Paul does in Romans 7. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but the very thing I hate.”
Maybe the invitation of the faith journey is to accept our desires. We welcome them fully and completely. Not begrudgingly, and not with despair. If we can accept all of these desires, we can know them fully and completely. If we divide our desires into good and bad, we will try to focus our attention on the good ones and control the bad ones.
But if these are just part of the wonder of who we are, if they are expressions of the very image of God that lives within us, we can embrace them. We feel how some desires can take us toward or away from the person we want to be. We will have to figure out what to do with each of them. But we don’t use a standard of God’s will to decide if they are good/bad or right/wrong. Instead, we connect to God’s yearning and desire for us, and see how our desires are aligned, or not aligned, with those desires.
In a future post we can explore more fully this idea of discerning how our desires do or do not align with God’s desires. But I’ll pause for now and give you a chance to wonder about my wonderings, and to offer your responses.
Thanks for your thoughts. I have found myself using the phrase God’s way rather than God’s will as this seems to reflect a quest or a process of discovering and discerning. Perhaps way is closer to desire than to will.
Peace,David
Way…path..journey. I think all of those connect with what I am trying to say about desire. It is interesting that a lot of religious traditions, especially Eastern ones, use these images. Of course, the biblical story talks about the early church as people of the way. Images that Western Christianity may have lost, or at least obscured, with its emphases on thinking and believing.
I found the concept of “longing for some end” to be both interesting and challenging. The best we can do is to believe in some positive end and strive to get there, an end which we have been repeatedly assured by other humans will occur if we just do this and this and this. Longing is probably an excellent word here because most of us will not receive our final pass/fail grade until after the fact. Thank you.
Yes, David, believing AND striving. As the FCC mission statement describes it, a “quest for faith.” Not just faith and belief, but a quest for a thriving faith. I do love the word longing. It often seems that the goal of thinking and believing is to satisfy longing instead of encourage it.