Watch each one reach for creature comfort
For the filling of their holes
—PETER GABRIEL1
A person can starve himself for only so long before the choice becomes clear: either I find something to eat, or … I’m gonna die. The hunger of eros eventually becomes so painful that the prospect of relief—wherever it can be found—trumps all fear of “breaking the rules.”
This is why the culture’s “fast-food gospel”—the promise of immediate gratification through indulgence of desire—inevitably wins large numbers of converts from the “starvation diet gospel.” I don’t know about you, but if the only two choices are starvation or greasy chicken nuggets, I’m going for the nuggets.
Like most people raised in Catholic schools in the ’70s and ’80s, I wasn’t getting my questions answered. And I had lots of them, especially about sex. So I looked for answers elsewhere—and the culture’s “fast-food” offering filled a void. Eating from this menu caught up with me in my college years. In fact, I ended up like the guy in the movie Super Size Me (2004)—the documentary by Morgan Spurlock who ate every meal at McDonald’s for thirty days to see what would happen to him. By the end of his little experiment, he was dying—his body was literally shutting down from all the grease and sodium he had consumed. That’s a fairly accurate picture of how I felt inside in my early twenties.
Let’s face it, there’s something in us that can be very attracted to the promise of happiness through noncommitted, pregnancy-free sexual indulgence. It’s a false promise, of course. For in the end, the “fast-food gospel” isn’t a gospel at all. Like the starvation diet, it leads to death—not by malnutrition, but by poisoning our system with unhealthy food.
Even so, in a way, its proponents are still on to something. The fast-food gospel mimics the banquet we’re created for. That’s why fast food can be so attractive. You see, there’s something the secular culture “gets” about us as human beings that the Jansenistic moralizers of the world don’t: eros is not something that needs to be repressed; it’s something that needs to be fed. What we feed it is another matter, of course. But eros must be given hope of satisfaction. To the Father Abruzzis of the world, the idea that eros must be given hope of satisfaction is, shall we say, “in-con-scchhievable!”
Saint Augustine was a man who knew what it was to pine and ache and burn inside. He felt desire so ardently and wrote about it so poignantly that I like to call him “the doctor of desire.” In fact, he maintained that the “whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing … That is our life, to be trained by longing”2—to follow the heart’s deepest desire where it ultimately takes us.
Understanding the human person in this way—as a creature of ardent desire—gives us new (and perhaps more compassionate) eyes to see what is going on all around us in today’s hyper-eroticized culture. In a marvelously insightful book called Desiring the Kingdom, philosophy professor James K. A. Smith suggests that the culture’s focus on sex and desire is not all bad. Even though the entertainment and marketing industries warp and misdirect eros (often terribly so), they’re still on to something.
Neuromarketers—those who study brain activity to gauge people’s response to marketing stimuli—report that the most effective advertisements and movie trailers are the ones that activate the part of the brain associated with desire, craving, and sex.3 Not surprising if we understand what makes the human being tick. In marketing we find the promise of a kind of transcendence that’s linked to what James K. A. Smith calls a “bastardization of the erotic.” Advertisers are well-schooled in the movements of our hearts. They know how to appeal directly to eros, and then, through substitution, they channel our yearning into their product—or at least associate their product with our desire and for only “three easy payments of $19.95” offer “satisfaction guaranteed.”
Anyone raised in our culture can think of endless examples of this bait and switch, but Smith singles out Victoria’s Secret as a particularly interesting case because of the way in which the company’s advertising reaches out to (and into) the longings of both men and women. Victoria’s Secret commercials appeal to men for obvious reasons, so the company advertises during football games for the same reason that kids’ cereals advertise during Saturday morning cartoons. And yet few men shop at Victoria’s Secret. But just as Kellogg’s knows kids will ask their parents for what they saw on TV, Victoria’s Secret knows men will ask women for the same. And because women want to be desired by men, they’ll shop at Victoria’s Secret. The “secret” here is the direct appeal to desire.
The common “churchy” response to all this is predictable enough: put a lid on it; the sexual passion coursing through the culture must be quelled. But Smith suggests that Victoria’s Secret might actually be right (or at least on to something) just where that repressive rigorism that passes for Christianity has been wrong. He elaborates:
More specifically, I think we should first recognize and admit that the marketing industry—which promises an erotically charged transcendence through media that connect to our heart and imagination—is operating with a better, more creational, more incarnational, more holistic anthropology than much of the [Christian world]. In other words, I think we must admit that the marketing industry is able to capture, form, and direct our desires precisely because they have rightly discerned that we are embodied, desiring creatures whose [hearts are] governed by the imagination. Marketers have figured out the way to our heart because they “get it”: they rightly understand that, at root, we are erotic creatures—creatures who are oriented primarily by love and passion and desire. In sum, I think Victoria is in on Augustine’s secret.4
Smith’s point is important. He’s certainly not condoning the soft porn of Victoria’s Secret (nor am I!). Rather, he’s challenging Christians to recognize that, although the marketing industry blatantly misdirects human desire, it still understands that we are embodied creatures of desire. This was Augustine’s secret: “Our life is a gymnasium of desire,” he said.5 The question, as always, is what do we do with our desire? Where do we take it? Do the promises of the “fast-food gospel” really pan out? Sex, sex, and more sex—this, we are told, is what we want? This is happiness? This is satisfaction? Really? Do we truly think the reason Mick Jagger “can’t get no satisfaction” is that he’s not having enough sex?
I look around at the culture and see evidence that there is plenty of sex going on, but very little happiness. Sigmund Freud himself reflected on “the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.”6 Maybe that “something” is the fact that sex is a finite reality, and we’re meant for something infinite. Sex hints at the infinite, and (from the Christian point of view) is meant to point us to it and even allow us to participate in it, but it seems we often mistake the hint for the reality hinted at. And when we take our desire for the infinite and try to satisfy it with something finite, we are always left wanting.
If eros is ultimately a yearning for the infinite, then we clearly miss the mark when we seek ultimate satisfaction of eros in finite things. And when we miss the mark, we sin (the Hebrew word for sin, hattah, means “to miss the mark”). The fast-food gospel actually forces us to reduce eros (as if that were possible), to limit desire and direct it to something less—something infinitely less—than what we’re really looking for. What leads us to the fast food, then, is not that we desire too much but that we desire too little! As C. S. Lewis put it:
Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, 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.7
It seems we are far too easily pleased, far too easily taken in by the “fast food,” because so few of us have ever even heard about the blissful satisfaction of eros promised us in the true Christian vision of things. Tragically, the majority of those raised in Christian homes have simply not heard the fullness of the “good news”—or at least not in a way that penetrated our hearts and engaged our erotic core, that place inside us that burns, not with pornographic lust, but with a noble eros. We all have our battles with the selfish pull of lust, but we all experience a noble eros also—that unquenchable yearning for love, for affirmation, for union, intimacy, joy, and fulfillment. Eros in this understanding, as Pope Benedict XVI put it, is the desire within us that “seeks God.”8
When the distinctions are never made between the distortions of eros on the one hand (what we might call “eroticism”), and the aspirations of a true, noble eros on the other, eros is condemned by the “righteous” and its distortions are celebrated by the “sinners.” Let’s face it, lacking any other place to take that “fire” within, many people see sex as the most powerful and attractive experience life has to offer—and far more fulfilling than anything “religion” seems to offer. Even in its distorted expressions, sex still hints at something we crave; it still offers some semblance of joy and happiness. Even in its cheapened and loveless expressions, sex still offers at least a momentary escape from the pressures and burdens of life. All of this led Woody Allen to quip, “Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go, it’s pretty damn good.”9
Yes, the fast-food gospel can seem “pretty damn good.” But in the end, frauds never pan out. The semblance of joy and happiness is not enough. Loveless indulgence of erotic desire can’t possibly reach us where we yearn to be reached, where the questions continue to gnaw at us, where the cry of the heart remains as haunting as ever. Even Hollywood is beginning to ask questions about the consequences of our sexual choices. Recent films like Friends with Benefits, No Strings Attached, and Crazy, Stupid, Love all ask the question: Is the semblance of satisfaction offered by uncommitted sex really what we’re looking for? Even Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner admits that despite countless “lovers,” he has “never known a fulfillment of love.”10
Is there such a fulfillment?
Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your love is more delightful than wine … The King has taken me into the wine cellar … He has taken me to the banquet hall, and his banner over me is love … (Song 1:2,4; 2:4)