thought exercise on Desire

Desire is primal: to be human is to want. Consider that wanting is the earliest language we learn. As infants, when we’re yet incapable of forming words on our tongue, we’re infinitely good at knowing...

Unsurprisingly, whenever we bring the topic of desire into view, our imaginations easily wander in the direction of sex, which can be as discomforting as it is arousing—but it is certainly not irrelev...

Many of the greatest Christian spiritual teachers and mystics such as Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Ignatius Loyola, or some of the seventeenth-century Anglican spiritual writers focus on the language...

In one of the classic scenes from Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, the misfortunate young orphan, Oliver, is stuck in a workhouse, laboring for long hours and getting barely enough gruel to keep h...

The church fathers consistently acknowledged the beauty and goodness of desire (e.g., Augustine, above), but they were not naive to the potential for desire to be bent by sin. They knew that our longi...

The fourteenth-century Italian mystic Catherine of Siena recognised this positive and extraordinary power of our desires when she wrote that it makes them one of the few ways of touching God because “...

Have you ever played in a swimming pool and tried to hold a beach ball under the surface? Its tendency-you might even say its penchant and desire-is to rise to the surface. It is “restless” when it is...

Desire haunts us. In its deepest sense, it is a God-given dimension of human identity. As such, desire is what powers all human spirituality. Yet at the same time, spirituality in Christianity and in ...

In her book Invitation to Retreat, Ruth Haley Barton shares some of the many insights she has had since she began intentionally taking inattentional retreats to re-connect with God and her own desires...

Desire—eros, or erotic desire, to be more specific—kicked in pretty early in my life. I was often overwhelmed by a gnawing hunger and thirst I didn’t know how to handle. God bless my parents and my Ca...

The famous medieval reformer and mystic, St. John of the Cross, wrote about some of the differences between the early days of a new convert and the long road of obedience that makes up the spiritual l...

In her engaging work, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes the nature of The Lord’s Prayer: To borrow from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lord’s Prayer is our “yes to God’s earth.” The Lor...

The creation of food, tongues, and the human digestive system is the product of infinite wisdom knitting the world together in a harmonious whole. The symphony of glory that sounds from the triune bei...

This excerpt from the Catholic priest Ronald Rolheiser is quite profound. It is reminiscent of that great line from Dr. Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park: “Life finds a way.” Speaking on the subject of desi...

While the search for the divine has been somewhat crowded out in modern times by our busy and overstimulated lives, it is still one of the most universal of human strivings. C. S. Lewis describes this...

In 1998, Nick Cave*, an Australian rock/pop artist, was asked by the Vienna Poetry Academy to give a series of talks on the nature of song-writing. A year later he gave a slightly revised version of t...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on etymology of home in v...

We are people of desire. We want things. We long for things. It is primal to our nature to yearn. As Saint Augustine reflected, “The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing. . . . That is o...

In her thought-provoking book, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes the tension in listening to our deepest desires: some of them these desires are integral to our identity, but they a...

You follow your desires wherever they take you, and you approve of yourself so long as you are not obviously hurting anyone else. You figure that if the people around you seem to like you, you must be...

A large part of what it means to be human is to be one who longs after things. Sometimes, we have trouble putting into words the longings inside us. Take for example these words from Anne Frank, just ...

In her engaging treatment, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes both the beauty and pain of seeing our own sinful nature: It is often true that once we are made to see, we don’t like w...

In The Phantom Tollbooth , there is a special kind of food called “subtraction stew.” Produced by a mathemagician, this stew makes you hungrier after you’ve eaten it. Our three main characters don’t ...

The "flight to nowhere" sold out in just ten minutes, with Qantas Airways declaring it the fastest-selling ticket in the airline's history. By nature, humans are constantly on the move, ...

Years ago Wendy and I were out to dinner and she observed that something was different about our marriage in recent years, something good. She asked me if I had any insight into what it was. After ref...

Desire is something no child has to be taught. Early in the developmental process, most of a child’s desires center around physical needs being met or objects that attract interest. If a child is secu...

To some degree we all get what we want. Maybe not all we want but what we most deeply desire ends up finding its way to us. If you are skeptical about this, try writing down one desire each day for a ...

Desire is part of what it means to be a child, as implied in Jesus’ words to his disciples when he tells them, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never ente...

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as wat...

For generations, psychologists thought that virtually all self-defeating behavior was caused by repression. I have now come to believe that addiction is a separate and even more self-defeating force t...