Igniting Desire

 ‘to be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.’

Anne Carson

Desire sometimes gets a bad press: Many of us - perhaps taking a lead from our families or subcultures, end up rejecting desire as ‘selfish’ or ‘immature’.

Though it can be those things, desire is so much more: It carries the best of us, as well as the worst, and is an essential ally in our buoyancy and engagement with life.

So if we have learned to shun or mute our passions, how do we re-engage with desire as a valuable bridge to our future?

Firstly, by honouring its power: Even the smallest desire – for a coffee on waking, to hear a friend’s voice when we are lonely - can coax us from apathy to action, from isolation to engagement; can carry us from a present moment of struggle or passivity and into an immediate future with some small good in it.

Larger desires – to create something that matters; to visit a country we have longed for; to become a better mother/brother/husband – become threads of constancy, sustaining pathways through our days and years.

They also become vehicles for gift: Our desire to fulfill our own potential, to grow in ways that are good for the collective, is an essential part of what carries our life energy forward and out to the world.

One of the reasons desire is so precious is because it's both real and personal. As Esther Perel reminds us, we do not pursue desires because we should, but because we want to.

We want them - they are a treat in some way, a source of pleasure or delight.

Why I Am Not a Buddhist | Molly Peacock

I love desire, the state of want and thought

of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul

requires desire. I love the things I've sought-

you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll

from my billfold- and love what I want: clothes,

houses, redemption. Can a new mauve suit

equal God? Oh no, desire is ranked. To lose

a loved pen is not like losing faith. Acute

desire for nut gateau is driven out by death,

but the cake on its plate has meaning,

even when love is endangered and nothing matters.

For my mother, health; for my sister, bereft,

wholeness. But why is desire suffering?

Because want leaves a world in tatters?

How else but in tatters should a world be?

A columned porch set high above a lake.

Here, take my money. A loved face in agony,

the spirit gone. Here, use my rags of love.

The Patterns of our Desires

“A man is a free being who is always changing into himself. This changing is never merely indifferent. We are always getting either better or worse. Our development is measured by our acts of free choice, and we make ourselves by the patterns of our desires.

If our desires reach out for the things that we were created to have and to make and to become, then we will develop into what we were truly meant to be.

But if our desires reach out for things that have have no meaning for the growth of our spirit, if they lose themselves in dreams or passions or illusions, we will be false to ourselves and to other men and to God. We will judge ourselves as aliens and exiles from ourselves and from God.

Thomas Merton

Explorations:

What is your own relation to desire? (Do you tend to view it as a source of creativity and hope, or as something to be over-ridden or subdued?)

How does the theme of discerning between desires speak to you? (eg Do you lean toward indulgence of small desires/immediate gratifications and ignore or neglect deeper ones, or do you feel a healthy sense of balance between these two?)