desire on Passion

Holy God, You call us to a passionate, all-consuming faith. Yet, so frequently, we give You half-hearted obedience or distracted, leftover moments of our time. You tell us that we are the salt of the ...

Lent 2021: A 40-day Heart Restoration The Broken Heart Bonus Content: Video prep session with Jin Cho on Psalm 51 . Password:  Bn*=61p! AIM Commentary Introduction Ash Wednesday Ash Wednes...

Pastor: O wise and wonderful God, in our quick temper and selfish pride, we have not followed your example—you are slow to anger, abounding in love, and show steadfast faithfulness to your children. ...

The Broken Heart Bonus Content: Video prep session with Jin Cho on Psalm 51 . Password:  Bn*=61p! Introduction Ash Wednesday Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of Lent: a time of p...

Introduction Ash Wednesday Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of Lent: a time of penitence, fasting, and prayer, in preparation for the great feast of resurrection. The season of Len...

Desire, if it’s to be trusted, should be inspired by a divine vocabulary.

If we truly love people, we will desire for them far more than it is within our power to give them, and this will lead us to prayer: Intercession is a way of loving others. . (San Francisco: HarperSan...

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

Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality.

In souls filled with love, the desire to please God is continual prayer.

We need to rescue “desire” from attempts to reduce its meaning to sexual libido and its increasingly murky associations with sexual abuse or sexual power games.

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.

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...

Desire is primal: to be human is to want

Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lov...

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...

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

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 ...

Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.

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 “...

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...

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...

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...

Sin comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in u...

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...

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...

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...

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 ignora...

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...