Holy Desires and the Desires of Our Own Hearts

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 “you have nothing infinite except your soul’s love and desire” (Dialogue, p. 270). The German Dominican mystic of the same period, Meister Eckhart, suggested that the reason why we are not able to see God is the faintness of our desire.

In the graceful language of desire that permeates Archbishop Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, one of the foundation documents of the English Reformation,…