Bound by wild desire
I fell into a ring of fire
—JOHNNY CASH1
The wild desire that Johnny Cash is singing about is clearly for a woman. And yet, as we’ve been learning, what we experience as an urge toward union with another human being is, in fact, at its deepest level, a longing for something far greater than anything another human being has to offer. Eros is a longing for the infinite.
This is why John Paul II insisted that we mustn’t conceive of sexual desire in human beings as a kind of base, animal drive. Human sexual desire as God created it to be is something profoundly dignified and noble. Sexual desire takes us to the meeting place within us between body and soul, between the physical and spiritual realms. It’s both a spiritual and a physical power within us that provides “a certain direction in man’s life implicit in his very nature. The sexual urge in this conception,” wrote John Paul II, “is a natural drive born in all human beings, a vector of aspiration along which [our] whole existence develops and perfects itself from within.”2
This is not a license from the pope to follow sexual desire “as is” wherever it leads. That’s a recipe for disaster. Rather this is an invitation to learn how to redirect eros toward Eros. This is an invitation to recognize that the sexual realm in the divine plan is meant to be a bridge into the realm of mystical union with God. This is why the two become “one flesh”: to reveal the “great mystery” of Christ’s union with the Church (see Eph. 5:31–32).
But, really—how do we cross that bridge from the sexual realm to the mystical realm? How do we make the leap from the “wild desire” we might feel for another human being to being set on fire for God? I recently got an e-mail from someone who was wrestling with this question: “I’m a guy who loves his wife,” he said. “I also love to watch the Victoria’s Secret fashion show. And I work at a job that’s stressful and demanding. How do I switch the focus of my life so that I long for God the way I long for my wife and for Alessandra Ambrósio? I mean, how can I even do that?”
I love his honesty. And that’s precisely where we need to start: by being honest with ourselves and honest with God about what really goes on inside of us and refusing to cover it over with a pious mask. So I suggested he take it up directly with God by praying something like this: “Lord, why am I so attracted to Alessandra Ambrósio? What is this fire she stirs in me? I give it entirely to you. Purify my desires and show me what I’m really looking for.” And then I encouraged him to listen. God wants to speak to our hearts about these things. Seriously. He’s not embarrassed. He doesn’t blush. He knows exactly why he created us as sexual beings, and he knows exactly how to heal us of our wounds and disorders in this area. But we need to learn how to open our hearts to him, and we need to learn how to listen to what he is saying to us. As we listen carefully and prayerfully, we might have an important memory come to mind. We might hear a song. We might see an image in our mind’s eye. We might “hear” a voice speaking to our hearts. Pay attention to those things. Write them down in a prayer journal.
One of the things God wants to show us is that behind all our misdirected desires and lusts there is a legitimate desire God put there and wants to satisfy. Uncovering that legitimate desire and entrusting its satisfaction entirely to God is critical to our healing and wholeness. As Father Jacques Philippe observes, “one passion can only be cured by another—a misplaced love by a greater love, wrong behavior by right behavior that makes provisions for the desire underlying the wrongdoing, recognizes the conscious or unconscious needs that seek fulfillment and … offers them legitimate satisfaction.”3 Some people call this “inner healing.”
Allow me to share an example from my own life. I was six or seven years old the first time I was exposed to pornography. It went downhill from there. When I gave my life to Christ in my early twenties, I was in need of serious healing from all the distorted images that had been ingrained in my brain. One day I was being bombarded by flashbacks and I cried out to God for help. I heard a voice in my heart say, “Give all those lies to me and I will show you the truth you were really looking for.” In my mind’s eye I saw an image of a fire, and as I pulled all these pornographic images up and out of my heart and placed them into the fire, I prayed, “Lord, please untwist these lies and show me the truth.” To my astonishment, what emerged from the fire, as the lies were consumed, was an image so beautiful, so holy, and so healing it moved me to tears: it was an image of the Christ child nursing at the breast of his mother. My heart cried out: “Yes, that’s what I had been looking for the whole time—to be fed like the Christ child in this holy, beautiful way. Forgive me Lord for all the sinful ways I have acted out, not trusting that you desired to feed this deep hunger in my soul all along.”
Would that that had been a “definitive healing” and the end of all of my disordered desires. Alas, the inner healing we need is part of a lifelong journey that takes us through various levels of painful, interior purifications. Step-by-step we learn to expose the real contents of our hearts to God and let him stretch our desires beyond the things of this world.
Scripture uses two very visceral images to describe what I’m talking about: “circumcision of the heart” (see Deut. 30:6; Rom. 2:25–29) and spiritual “labor pains” (see John 16:21–22; Rom. 8:22–24)—or perhaps in this case we could say “dilation of the heart.” The masculine image is not intended only for men; nor is the feminine image intended only for women. “Circumcision of the heart” speaks of the need in both men and women to “cut away” whatever hides or covers the most intimate “anatomy of our hearts” and keeps our most intimate center from being exposed to God. “Dilation of the heart” speaks of the need in both women and men for our hearts to be stretched to their maximum capacity—to the point that they are large enough and open enough to receive and even “give birth to” infinity.
Circumcision and dilation; exposing and stretching our hearts—this is what’s required of us as we venture along the way of redirecting our desires toward that which truly satisfies. Another name for this “way,” this journey of both exposing and stretching our hearts, is simply the way of prayer.
“The Fathers of the Church say that prayer, properly understood, is nothing other than becoming a longing for God.”4 The life of prayer is already in us: if we reach into our deepest desires, we will discover our prayer. To “pray without ceasing,” then, as the Apostle Paul admonishes us to do (1 Thess. 5:17), one must learn how to live within the painful “ache” of constant longing. As Saint Augustine put it, “Desire is your prayer; and if your desire is without ceasing, your prayer will also be without ceasing. The continuance of your longing is the continuance of your prayer.”5 It is “not with the noise of words” that God hears us, says Saint Teresa of Avila, “but with longing.”6
This means prayer can be a messy affair, for longing on this side of original sin is often messy. It makes us suffer. And that suffering often makes us peeved. At God. Deep anger at God is a typical part of the fallen human condition. It’s in us somewhere, and anyone who makes the journey of redirecting desire toward authentic satisfaction—that is, anyone who makes the journey of prayer—is bound to bump into this primordial pocket of pent-up pomposity.
Somewhere along the line people of faith can get the impression that merely discovering this anger within them makes them “bad Christians.” So whenever it surfaces, rather than honestly facing it and working through it, we try to stuff it, ignore it, and put on a pious mask. We do this with all of our brokenness and sinfulness as human beings. We’re afraid to look at how broken we really are, so we tend to pave over it and pretend it’s not there.
True contemplative prayer, however, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church observes, is where we “let our masks fall.” It’s where we get real with God. It’s where we get naked, allowing our hearts to be fully exposed (circumcised). Only then can we hand ourselves over to God as we truly are—the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly—“as an offering to be purified and transformed.”7
I remember a significant experience of having one of my “pious masks” fall off. It wasn’t pretty, but from another perspective it was beautiful.
I was on a retreat several years ago in which I was blessed to have as my retreat master a holy, elderly monsignor (an honorary term given by the Catholic Church to distinguished priests) who had been a confessor and retreat master for Mother Teresa and whose own spiritual director had been Saint Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio). In other words, this was a solid, trustworthy priest. The good monsignor told me how Mother Teresa in particular had taught him the connection between depth of desire and depth of prayer. In fact, he said he had never known anyone with a more ravenous hunger and desire than Mother Teresa.
Through various prayer assignments on the retreat, I was led deeper and deeper into the “ache” of my soul. The further I journeyed, the more I felt like I was entering an infinite abyss of unsatisfied and seemingly unsatisfiable yearning. Lots of memories from my life surfaced, most of them having to do with stuffing the pain of unsatisfied desire. As that pain presented itself, I was overwhelmed with a sense of feeling abandoned by God. I felt utterly helpless in my inability to satisfy my yearnings … and I became enraged.
The good monsignor had encouraged complete honesty in my journaling, so the pious masks that covered my anger fell and I let God have it. This is what I wrote in my journal, with a few choice words censored:
Same place I always arrive when I look honestly at my yearning—anger. I hate this! What’s the this I hate? My utter dependence. Here I am, Lord. Come and get me. You bring me to this place of yearning and I can do nothing. So here. Here I am. I give you naked, helpless me as I am. [Then I let it out.] I #$@# hate this utterly dependent, helpless #$@#. I understand why people don’t believe in you, Lord. I get it. I get why people choose to be atheists. I’m starved and alone and unloved and unwanted and agitated and I can’t do a thing about it. And you can, but you make me wait. What the #$@# is that!? What kind of God are you? Why do you leave me just to suffer in my yearning with nothing to do but wait!!?? Are you ever going to show up, or am I just going to die of starvation? Aaaaarghhh!!
I swiftly went to confession convinced I had just terribly offended God with my rage, my “lack of faith,” my “lack of trust,” and a long list of other things for which I was readily condemning myself. When I sheepishly confessed to the monsignor what I had said to God, the first word out of his mouth was “Good …” Expecting the next word to be “confession,” I was flabbergasted to hear him say “Good … prayer.” Our dialogue then went something like this:
CW: What? What did you just say?
MONSIGNOR: (with authority) That was a good prayer.
CW: Excuse me?
MONSIGNOR: That was a good prayer.
CW: What do you mean? I just chewed out God. How could that be a good prayer?
MONSIGNOR: Haven’t you ever read Psalm 22?
CW: Refresh my memory.
MONSIGNOR: It’s what Jesus prayed from the cross. It’s a “prayer of agony” in which the psalmist basically “lets God have it” for abandoning him. Lots of psalms express the agony you were feeling, and the psalms are all good prayers. What you felt in your heart was a share in what Jesus felt in his heart on the cross. You expressed it in your way, and Jesus expressed it in his, but it’s the same cry of the heart. In fact, what you experienced was Jesus in you crying out to the Father: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me!” You’re learning to pray the prayer of agony. And it’s not a prayer of doubt. It’s a prayer of faith. You wouldn’t be screaming at God if you didn’t believe in him. You wouldn’t be screaming at God if you didn’t think he could hear you and rescue you. Same with Christ on the cross. That’s why I said good prayer.
The saintly monsignor then explained that the sins for which I really needed to repent were those of self-condemnation, self-blame, self-doubt, self-recrimination, and false piety. A skewed notion of piety in my head, he said, had made me think I was being “virtuous” in condemning myself for this honest prayer. This “virtue,” in fact, was the real vice, he insisted. And this vice is often what holds people back from true prayer, from letting our masks fall and turning our hearts back to the Lord who loves us, from handing ourselves over to him as an offering to be purified and transformed.8
I share what happened on that retreat simply to provide a real-life example of the kind of “circumcision of the heart” that is required on the journey of prayer and desire. It’s exemplified in the psalmist’s cry: “All my longings lie open before you, O Lord; my groans are not hidden from you. My heart throbs” (Ps. 38:9–10). Exposing our hearts to God in this way teaches us humility. For it’s pride that leads us to “hide” in the first place. It’s a pattern that goes the whole way back to Eden: “I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself” (Gen. 3:10).
We know our sinfulness is ugly, and we think no one could possibly love us as we really are. So we “pretty ourselves up” in order to be loved and accepted, all the while rejecting who we truly are. We take on a false identity, hiding our true broken selves behind a great many masks. I know, for example, that, fearing to face my failures as a husband and father, I’ve hidden behind an inflated image of myself as a “good husband” and a “good father.” I’ve hidden behind a busy and “successful” ministry—behind books and accolades and accomplishments. All so many fig leaves.
But the more we hide, the more we begin to wonder: If I’m only loved when I’m wearing a mask, am I really loved? Can anyone really love me when all the masks are removed, when my ugliness is on display, when all the fig leaves are gone? We don’t only want to be loved at “our best”; we want—in fact, we need—to be loved at our worst. We need to be loved in our nakedness: warts, blemishes, and all.
In the journey of prayer, we’re seeking “nuptial union” with the Bridegroom, as the mystical tradition puts it.9 And, to go with this image, if spouses want to unite, they need to take their clothes off. This may be a startling and perhaps even scandalous idea for some, but not if we understand the deep mystical sense in which the “one flesh” union of spouses images Christ’s love for the Church. God wants to enter our hearts and have us enter into his in a way that is analogous to the intimacy of spouses. But we have to be willing to be completely “naked” before him. “According to the words of Sacred Scripture,” John Paul II wrote, “God penetrates the creature, who is completely ‘naked’ before him.”10
John Paul II also insisted that we have a duty to show the world “to what depths the relationship with Christ can lead.” It is “a journey totally sustained by grace,” he said, “which nonetheless demands an intense spiritual commitment and is no stranger to painful purifications … But it leads, in various possible ways, to the ineffable joy experienced by the mystics as ‘nuptial union.’ ”11 The Lord longs, thirsts, pines to enter this union with us in the intimacy of our hearts, so he can show us that he loves us as we really are.
Always with a tender love for us (although it can feel violent at times), the Lord accomplishes this “exposure of our hearts” through painful trials that the mystical tradition calls “strip-pings,” “denudings,” or “dark nights.” Father Jacques Philippe describes this phenomenon well in the following passage:
The trials or “purifications” so frequently referred to by the mystics are there to destroy whatever is artificial in our character, so that our true being may emerge … The [dark] night of the soul could be called a series of impoverishments, sometimes violent ones, that strip believers of all possibility of relying on themselves. These trials are beneficial, because they lead us to locate our identity where it truly belongs … [They also deprive] us of any possibility of relying on [ourselves and] the good that we can do. God’s mercy is all … Progressively, and in a way that parallels their terrible impoverishment, those who go through such trials while still hoping in the Lord, begin to realize the truth of something that up until then was only a pious expression: God loves us in an absolutely unconditional way, by virtue of himself, his mercy, and his infinite tenderness, by virtue of his Fatherhood towards us.12
His Fatherhood toward us is precisely the love, as we heard sung in Babette’s Feast, that would “never give a stone to the child who begs for bread” (see Matt. 7:9). The Father “satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things” (Ps. 107:9), freely offering bread from heaven “endowed with all delights and conforming to every taste” (Wis. 16:20). But we must learn how to “wait upon the Lord.”
“See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You too must be patient. Make your hearts firm …” (James 5:7–8). “Wait for the Lord with courage; be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord” (Ps. 27:14). It’s in this waiting that our desires are stre-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-etched. Oh! It’s painful! Our prayer, our waiting, becomes a lifelong groan.
Drawing from Saint Augustine’s definition of prayer as an exercise of desire, Benedict XVI writes: “Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched.”13 Augustine speaks of this “stretching” as follows:
When you would fill a purse, knowing how large a present it is to hold, you stretch wide its cloth or leather: knowing how much you are to put in it, and seeing that the purse is small, you extend it to make more room. So by delaying [his gift] God strengthens our longing, through longing he expands our soul, and by expanding our soul he increases its capacity. So brethren, let us long, because we are to be filled … That is our life, to be trained by longing; and our training through the holy longing advances in the measure that our longings are detached from the love of this world … Let us stretch ourselves out towards him, that when he comes he may fill us full.14
Here “love of this world” refers to our idolatrous attachment to created things. In short, to be “trained by longing” means to learn how to take our longing for infinity to infinity, and to settle for nothing less than infinity. In this continuous “dilation of our hearts,” our desire increases until we are convinced that there really and truly is nothing in this world that can possibly satisfy it. Only then are we willing and able truly to “let go” of our idols—those created things that we turn to as God-substitutes.
This is how we learn what the saints call “detachment” from the pleasures and riches of this world.15 Detachment does not mean we become cold or unfeeling toward the true gifts and pleasures this life has to offer. Remember, the goal is not stoicism. The goal is mysticism. When we are properly “trained by longing,” every pleasure in this life is like a teaser for heaven. True detachment affords the freedom to rejoice rightly in the good things of this life without making idols of them.
And so, contrary to widespread belief and practice, if one is idolatrously attached to the pleasures of this world, the solution is not to turn the volume down on our desires, but to turn the volume up—way up. This may be surprising, even unsettling, but it can’t be otherwise. We must have “great confidence,” Saint Teresa of Avila tells us, “for it is necessary not to hold back one’s desire.”16 And, as Saint Catherine of Siena says, “If you would make progress … you must be thirsty, because … those who are not thirsty will never persevere in their journey.”17 If we stop thirsting in this life, we have either repressed our desire or some idol is posing as our satisfaction, and the journey ceases.
“But these saints who talk about increasing desire are talking about desire for God,” went an e-mail I once received from a person overwhelmed by lust. “I don’t feel a desire for God when I’m being tempted by my desire to look at porn and masturbate. It sounds like you’re saying I should increase a desire that I know is only going to get me in trouble.”
Let me be clear: when I say we need to turn our desires up, I’m not saying we should fan the flame of our disordered desires. What I’m saying is that disordered desire—however it may manifest itself in our individual lives—is a reduction of the original fullness of desire with which God created us. When we find ourselves idolatrously attached to pornographic images, for example, we are experiencing this tragic reduction of eros. The ultimate solution to the problem, therefore, cannot lie in reducing eros even more than it already has been reduced, and much less in obliterating eros. Rather, as John Paul II says, we must come to “experience that fullness of ‘eros,’ which implies the upward impulse of the human spirit toward what is true, good, and beautiful, so that what is ‘erotic’ also becomes true, good, and beautiful.”18 Turning eros up—way up—means precisely this: rediscovering the lost fullness of eros as a desire for the infinite, as a desire for God. This is a long and difficult journey, but it is one made possible by God’s grace.
Think about it: if “the banquet”—infinite satisfaction of our desire in God—is real, then there’s no need to repress desire as the “starvation-diet gospel” would have us do, and there’s no need to reduce desire to addicting, finite pleasures as the “fast-food gospel” would have us do. Rather, if the banquet is real, we can and must learn how to unleash desire so God can fill us full. That’s what the journey of prayer is all about. If it seems daunting, you’re right: it is! You might simply begin by praying from your heart: Lord, I recognize these twisted, lustful desires within me. Lead me on the journey of untwisting them so that I might come to experience the fullness of eros as a longing for you. Or, another prayer you might pray is this one: Lord, I desire you; increase my desire; or this one: Lord, into your hands I commend the satisfaction of my every desire.
The journey of “stretching desire” is exemplified powerfully in the loving sighs of the bride in the Song of Songs. She is “sick with love” as her desire compels her to search without ceasing for her lover: “I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer. I will rise now and go about the city … I will seek him whom my heart loves” (Song 3:1–2). “I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned and gone. My heart failed me … I found him not; I called him but he gave no answer … I am sick with love” (Song 5:6, 8).
Commenting on this “agony” of the bride’s unsatisfied yearning for the bridegroom, great saints like Augustine, Gregory, and Bernard tell us that Christ keeps his bride waiting to increase and stretch her desire. Desire is the faculty that not only pines after the divine gift, but also receives it when it is given, so the wider our desire, the more we are capable of receiving. Christ wants us to be as wide open to his gift as possible, stretched in our desire unto infinity, because that’s what he has to offer us: the wild ecstasy of infinite bliss.
Like the bride in the Song of Songs, our search for this ecstasy will involve the agony of loss, but the agony itself is a prayer, as is the ecstasy to which it leads. And so the mystical tradition speaks both of the “prayer of agony” and the “prayer of ecstasy.” And this simply means sharing in the sufferings of Christ so that we might also share in his infinite joy and glory. “All these sufferings are meant to increase one’s desire to enjoy the Spouse,” says Teresa of Avila. God “is enabling the soul through these afflictions and many others to have the courage to be joined with so great a Lord and to take him as its Spouse.”19 In short, God teaches us courage in the prayer of agony because we need even more courage to endure the prayer of ecstasy. We need even more courage to endure the prayer of ecstasy? Really? What kind of ecstasy, then, must God have in store for us? Whatever it is, the Apostle Paul says our sufferings are nothing compared to the glory that will be revealed in us (Rom. 8:18).
Until then, as Father Simon Tugwell expresses it: “The gift which God makes of himself in this life is known chiefly in the increase of our desire for him. And that desire, being love, is infinite, and so stretches our mortal life to its limits. And that stretching is our most earnest joy, but it is also our most earnest suffering in this life. So those who hunger and thirst are, even now, truly blessed; but their blessedness is that of those who mourn.”20
Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who mourn now, for you will laugh.
(Luke 6:21)