desire on Emptiness

Many of us presume that atheists and agnostics don’t think or care one bit for God. But this is not the case. Heinrich Böll, a German writer and devout Catholic, once joked, “I don’t like these atheis...

There is an invisible pattern in the design of deprivation: deprivation draws out desire. Absence heightens it. And the more heightened the desire, the greater our satisfaction will ultimately be. It ...

"What is it you’re looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there’ll b...

The desire to feel loved is the last illusion: let it go and you will be free

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 ...

There is an energy within all of us that haunts us and can either lead us to set out on a quest for something more or can frustrate us by making us nostalgic for what we do not have.

It is not your idea, not your understanding, not your thinking, not your reasoning, not even your profession of faith, that here can quench the thirst. The home-sickness goes out after God Himself... ...

[The] soul went forth (being led by God) for love of Him alone, enkindled in love of Him, upon a dark night, which is the privation and purgation of all its sensual desires, with respect to all outwar...

Holy God, we come to You confessing that we never have enough. We are never satisfied with what You have given us. We look at others with envy and we want more, even when our homes are overflowing wit...

Let temporal things serve your use, but the eternal be the object of your desire.

Dear God, my Heavenly Father, My heart is unclean, but you can purify it. My heart is full of darkness, but you can illuminate it. My heart is sad, but you can comfort it. My heart is wicked, but ...

We prefer the not wanting and not having to the losing.

Prayer of Confession All: Certainly God is good to his people, to those pure in heart, but as for me, I nearly stumbled; I nearly lost my sure footing. I struggle with envy as I look at the those in ...

All joy emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.

We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves; we desire to live an imaginary life in the minds of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine.

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...

But you take pleasure in the faces Of those who know they thirst.

The reason we are not able to see God is the faintness of our desire.

Gracious God, the noise of this world drowns out the beauty of your voice. You invite us to listen, but we deny you time and space. Forgive us for ignoring you. Create in us the desire to listen to yo...

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

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...

But the main point is that there is nothing passive or limp about desire, for it gives energy and direction to our psyche.

Everybody’s got a hungry heart.

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 ...

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 r...

After twenty years of listening to the yearnings of people’s hearts [as a counselor], I am convinced that all human beings have an inborn desire for God.

“If there is no God, never was a God, why do we miss him so much?” asked one agnostic European Jew as he looked back on the horrors of the twentieth century.

As the deer pants for the water, so we need you, O God. However, we don’t always turn toward to you as we need. Instead of seeking you, we turn to cheap and easy solutions. Please show us that you alo...

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...

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...