Desire for God (Fulfillment of All Longing 1)
Awakening Desire
The first words of Jesus in the Gospel of John are not: “Follow all these rules or you’re going to hell.” Rather, Christ probes our hearts with a question: “What do you want?” (Jn 1:38). Christianity is not “about suffocating the longing that dwells in the heart of man, but about freeing it, so that it can reach its true height” (Pope Benedict XVI, Nov 7, 2012).
A “desire” is a yearning for something that promises to fill a void; a longing for that which promises satisfaction in its attainment. It comes from the Latin root meaning: to long for, wish for, hope for, to expect.
St Augustine says The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing. He says we need to be trained by longing. (Homily on First Letter of John).
(Pope Francis, Aug 11, 2013) “I will ask you two questions.
· The first: Do all of you have a desiring heart, a heart that desires? Think and answer in silence and in your heart: Do you have a heart that desires, or do you have a closed heart, a heart that is asleep, a heart that is anesthetized against the things of life? …
· And the second question: …What is the most important, most precious reality for you, the reality that pulls at your heart like a magnet?”
Beauty awakens the desire for God
Think of a time in your life when your heart was pierced by something breathtakingly beautiful. What feelings did it awaken?
Beauty has the power to awaken our deepest desires…
Beauty has both the power to wound us (desire causes us to “ache”) and the power to fill our hearts with hope … hope of the fulfillment of our deepest desires … hope that we will somehow participate in Beauty for all eternity…
C.S. Lewis writes in the Weight of Glory:
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it … At present we … cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in” (C.S. Lewis, WG pp. 42-43).
“The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; … it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude [supreme bliss and happiness]” (CCC 1818).
“Hope may break through in a song, a sunset, a poem, a movie, an unexpected act of kindness, a good laugh, the birth of a child, the embrace of a loved one. And when these moments come we should drink them in … and listen. If we listen, we can almost hear a voice whispering to our hearts: ‘It is good to be here. Rest here for a while. Savor it. For this is a taste, a taste of what is to come. Let it lift you up. Let if fire you up. Let it give you hope. You’re not crazy. You’re not wrong to believe there’s something more. You will not be unhappy. Have faith. Trust. … It’s coming. Your desire for Life, Infinite Life is not in vain’” (West, FTH, p. 61).
The Desire for God
All that is beautiful in this world is to direct our desire for God. the author of all being, the one who is beauty, who can satisfy all our desires.
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” writes Saint Augustine. The Greeks called this deep, restless yearning we feel “eros,” from which we derive the English word “erotic.”
· While eros is closely linked with our desire for sexual love and union, that is but a shadow of a much deeper longing for eternal love and union.
In its richest sense, eros is a reaching and a yearning with every fiber of our being for the fullness of life, of love, of God; it’s a yearning for the infinite!
Saint Francis de Sales observed that eros is the desire “that draws love out, that expands [our heart’s] capacity, that passionately rushes toward divinization” (the very participation in divine life and love).
Eros is the desire in us that “seeks God.” In the journey of this life, eros is meant “to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude [supreme bliss and happiness] for which our whole being yearns” (Benedict XVI, DC 7, 4).
“Despite all the widespread impressions to the contrary, we must impress this truth upon our souls and allow it to settle in our bones: Christianity is the religion of desire – the religion that redeems eros – and its saints are the ones who have had the courage to feel the abyss of longing in their souls and in their bodies and to open that longing in ‘the groanings of prayer’ to the One who alone can heal their ‘wound of love’” (West, FTH, p. 39).
Prayer as Longing
We need to think of prayer in a new way. Prayer is not one more thing to do. Prayer is simply giving in to our desire for God. Pope Benedict writes: “The Fathers of the Church say that prayer, properly understood, is nothing other than becoming a longing for God” (Benedict XVI, MCS, p. 15).
“The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for: The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God” (CCC 27)
Cry Out of the Depths
Prayer, says the Catechism, is the cry “out of the depths” of a humble and contrite heart (see CCC 2559). It is motivated by “the ‘love of beauty’ [that] is caught up in the glory of the living and true God” (CCC 2727).
Today, pay careful attention to encounters with beauty and how they stir your heart. Consider them “moments of prayer” – opportunities to allow the deeper desires of your heart to be awakened and directed toward God.
What Do You Want?
We all have a powerful desire within us that we call “eros,” that is, a hunger or thirst for infinite beauty, goodness, and truth, a desire for God. We have this desire because we were made for union with God. Faced with this desire, we have three options: Become a stoic who represses all desire and just follows the rules; Become an addict who tries to fill his infinite desire with the finite pleasure that can never satisfy but only enslave; Become an aspiring mystic; one who longs for God.