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Chapter Two
The Dilemma of Desire
I never knew the dusk could break my heart
So much longing folding in
I’d give years away to have you here
To know I can’t lose you again.
—Fernando Ortega
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?
—Tina Turner
I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.
—C. S. Lewis
High on the slopes of the world’s tallest mountain, slightly less than twenty-nine thousand feet above the level of the sea, the climber has halted in his tracks. He can go no farther. His whole life has come down to this. After years of planning and preparation, he has trekked halfway across the globe to a strange country high in the Himalayas. He has drained his bank account and damaged his relationships. His career has suffered. He has sacrificed everything in his life for this moment. But none of that matters now. He is exhausted. His breathing is labored. He is forced to pause after each step for three heaving breaths, followed by another step, then a pause. As he creeps along a razor’s edge of snow, each move requires an agonizing amount of concentration. Oxygen deprivation reduces his mental faculties to those of a small child. Ahead of him rises the Hillary Step, a forty-foot wall of nearly vertical ice. It is all that stands between him and the goal of his life. But he is not sure he can go on.
I am haunted by the stories of people who make the summit of Everest. Such incredible devotion is required, such total focus of body, soul, and spirit. Reaching the top of the world’s tallest mountain becomes for those who try the central driving force of their lives. The goal is remarkable and the journey uncertain. Many climbers have been lost on the mountain. Those who reach the summit and return safely are among a rare and elite group of mountaineers in the world. Why do they do it? How do they do it?
Jon Krakauer recounted the desperate tale of the ill-fated ’96 expedition in his book Into Thin Air: “There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act—a triumph of desire over sensibility.” It is a feat begun in desire that can be accomplished only through desire. Krakauer explained how one of his climbing partners attained the summit: “Yasuko had been propelled up the mountain by the unwavering intensity of her desire.”
Desire—it’s the only way you will ever make it. Take marriage, for instance. Or singleness. Either makes for a far more difficult and arduous ascent than Everest, in large part because it does not seem so. The struggles are not heightened and focused into one month of do or die; rather, they stretch on across a lifetime. So it is with any act of faith or of hope—anything, in other words, that makes a life worth living. How can we possibly sustain such an intrinsically irrational act as love if we’ve killed our desire? May honestly admits,
Choosing love will open spaces of immense beauty and joy for you, but you will be hurt. You already know this. You have retreated from love countless times in your life because of it. We all have. We have been and will be hurt by the loss of loved ones, by what they have done to us and we to them. Even in the bliss of love there is a certain exquisite pain: the pain of too much beauty, of overwhelming magnificence. Further, no matter how perfect a love may be, it is never really satisfied . . . In both joy and pain, love is boundless. (The Awakened Heart)
Desire is the source of our most noble aspirations and our deepest sorrows. The pleasure and the pain go together; indeed, they emanate from the same region in our hearts. We cannot live without the yearning, and yet the yearning sets us up for disappointment—sometimes deep and devastating disappointment. One storm claimed the lives of eight of Krakauer’s companions in the Everest disaster of 1996. Should they not have tried? Many have said they were foolish even to begin. Do we reach for nothing in life because our reaching opens us up to tragedy? Because of its vulnerable nature, desire begins to feel like our worst enemy.
Friend or Foe?
“I’m beginning to despise the hope.” We were talking about life, a friend and I, and how hard it was to keep pressing on. David had been through a series of setbacks in his career, going from earning a six-figure income at a top Wall Street firm to driving a courier van, making deliveries. It’s the hardest fall a man takes. He didn’t want to be there; he wanted to climb out of the slump he was in. Occasionally, an opportunity would present itself. He’d get a call or a contact through a friend. Putting on a coat and tie, David would head out into the arena. The desire for something better would resurface, only to be thwarted. The interview seemed to go well at the time, but then he’d sit by the phone and the call would never come. Each time he reached for a rung up the ladder, the rung broke, and he found himself back at the bottom. After several years of the cycle, he found himself despising hope. “It just sets me up for another fall. Why bother?”
I think of another friend, Carol, whose life has been marked over the years by one disappointing relationship after another. Just when she is ready to call it quits on loving altogether, hope appears on the horizon. She ventures out cautiously. And several months later, her heart is broken again. Over lunch yesterday she used nearly the same words: “I hate hope.” Hope rouses the desire from its slumber and makes us even more vulnerable to disappointment.
As Carol and I spoke about life and love, I thought of Fantine, one of the tragic characters in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. Fantine is a young single mother who works in a factory to support her daughter, whom she had to send away to live with an innkeeper. Fired for refusing the sexual advances of the foreman, she finds herself on the streets without a job, a place to stay, or a means of caring for her child. Those of you who have seen the musical will recall the hauntingly beautiful song she sings, entitled “I Dreamed a Dream.”
I had a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
She remembers being young and unafraid, that time in our lives when dreams are “made and used and wasted.” She tells of a love that came to her, filling her days with endless wonder.
He became the father of her child and then, one day, disappeared. She dreams he will return, but knows he never will. I know too many women who have lived through this nightmare. Their lives are filled with weariness, loneliness, and resignation. Fantine ends by singing,
I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.
When Dreams Die
I understand. I know the dilemma of desire. Brent was killed on the doorstep of our dreams. You see, as our friendship deepened over the years, we discovered within us a similar hope. Long before I met him, I had begun to dream of having a ranch where people could come to recover their hearts, a place of beauty and adventure where one could learn about life’s journey. I was shy to even mention it; heaven knows I had hidden it from everyone for years. How stunned with delight I was to find that he held the same desire. C. S. Lewis knew:
Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling . . . of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? (The Problem of Pain)
God seemed to be affirming that dream as we partnered together, speaking at conferences, writing, counseling. Still, it felt like courage even to allow ourselves to dream. We had both known enough disappointment in our lives to be wary of hope; maybe we’d both grown more than a little resigned. Both of us had been failed deeply by key men in our lives. Dare we trust?
Yet something deeper in us urged us to move forward. Alexander Pope knew that “hope springs eternal in the human breast.” We planned to begin this great ascent of our desire last May, inviting a small group of men to join us on a ranch for a long weekend of conversation and adventure. It would be the inaugural voyage, the test flight for our dream. On the afternoon of the second day, Brent was killed. The rocks on which he was standing eighty feet above the ground crumbled beneath him.
“Despair,” wrote James Houston, “is the fate of the desiring soul.” Or as Scripture says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Prov. 13:12 nlt). How agonizing it can be to awaken desire! Over the past year I have wrestled deeply with what it means to go on. God has come to me again and again, insisting that I not give up the dream. I have ranted and railed, fought him and dismissed him. It feels crazy to desire anymore. What does it mean to live the rest of my life without my closest friend? I think of Lewis and Clark, those inseparable wilderness explorers, how we cannot think of one without the other. Lewis said of his companion, “I could neither hope, wish, nor expect from a union with any man on earth, more perfect support or further aid in the discharge of my mission, than that, which I am confident I shall derive from being associated with yourself.” I know I shall never find another like him.
But I am not alone in this. Most of you will by this time have lost a parent, a spouse, even a child. Your hopes for your career have not panned out. Your health has given way. Relationships have turned sour. We all know the dilemma of desire, how awful it feels to open our hearts to joy, only to have grief come in. They go together. We know that. What we don’t know is what to do with it, how to live in this world with desire so deep in us and disappointment lurking behind every corner. After we’ve taken a few arrows, dare we even desire?
I have come to the point that I am able to start looking at ranches again, but I can barely open myself to friendship. Still, something in me knows that to kill desire is to kill my heart al-together. Langston Hughes wrote,
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow. (“Dreams”)
Do we form no friendships because our friends might be taken from us? Do we refuse to love because we may be hurt? Do we forsake our dreams because hope has been deferred? To de-sire is to open our hearts to the possibility of pain; to shut down our hearts is to die altogether. The full proverb reads this way: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when dreams come true, there is life and joy.”
The road to life and joy lies through, not around, the heartsickness of hope deferred. A good friend came to this realization recently. As we sat talking over breakfast, he put words to our dilemma: “I stand at the crossroads, and I am afraid of the desire. For forty-one years I’ve tried to control my life by killing the desire, but I can’t. Now I know it. But to allow it to be, to let it out is frightening because I know I’ll have to give up the control of my life. Is there another option?”
The option most of us have chosen is to reduce our desire to a more manageable size. We allow it out only in small doses—just what we can arrange for. Dinner out, a new sofa, a vacation to look forward to, a little too much to drink. It’s not working. The tremors of the earthquake inside are beginning to break out.
The Battle Between Us
I haven’t been the friendliest driver lately. Oh, I’m fine—until I’m provoked. When people cut me off, I’m furious. Just the other day, a car began to get on the highway as I was passing by. The fellow ignored all the rules of merging and cut in front of me as I was doing full speed. I hit my brakes to avoid him and honked my horn. He looked back, snarled, and yelled something unprintable. That did it. Only the fear of higher insurance premiums kept me from running him off the road. But oh, how I wanted to. Of course, this never happens to you. You are kind and benevolent when someone cuts you off. Why, you’re practically happy when he steals your parking place, darts in right ahead of you. You smile and offer a blessing.
What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Isn’t it the whole army of evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous for what others have, and you can’t possess it, so you fight and quarrel to take it away from them. (James 4:1–2 nlt)
What do you make of all the road rage that’s been surfacing? You don’t think it’s really about traffic etiquette, do you? People are shooting at each other on the freeway. This is not about bad manners or a need for driver’s ed. There is something deeper, something pent up inside us. The fellow who cut me off didn’t really endanger my life; but the violation felt like a symbol of a deeper, ongoing reality. Dan Allender points out,
In every person there is a passionate, driving desire for more . . . The dilemma is that our longings for material joy are almost always partially blocked; our desires for better health and deeper relationships are never entirely possible; and the illusion of world peace seems no more attainable than the gold at the end of the rainbow. Our passion is more than usually stymied. The world simply does not bend to the desires that roar or whimper inside us. Our desires—from picking the quickest line at the bank to the overwhelming hope that our children will walk righteously with the Lord—are rarely satisfied in a way that relieves the ache of incompleteness . . . Our heart seems to rage against the ache. Our typical response to the heartbreak and sorrow of disappointment is murderous rage . . . We want someone to pay. (Bold Love)
The life we have is so far from the life we truly want, and it doesn’t take us long to find someone to blame. In order for our longings to be filled, we need the cooperation of others. I long for a loving embrace and a kind word when I get home. I long for my boys to listen attentively when I talk about important life lessons. I want my work to be appreciated. I want my friends to be there for me in hard times. “No man is an island,” wrote John Donne, and he could have been speaking of desire. We need others—it’s part of our design. Very few of our desires are self-fulfilling; all our deepest longings require others to come through for us. Inevitably, someone stands in the way.
At its best, the world is indifferent to my desires. The air traffic controllers aren’t the least affected when I’ve been traveling for a week and the plane they’ve chosen to cancel is my last chance to get home to my family. So long as it doesn’t affect them, they couldn’t care less. We suffer the violation of indifference on a daily basis, from friends, from family, from complete strangers. We think we’ve grown to accept it as part of life, but the effect is building inside us. We weren’t made to be ignored. And though we try to pretend it doesn’t really matter, the collective effect of living in a world apathetic to our existence is doing damage to our souls. Events such as bad traffic or delayed flights are merely the occasions for our true desperation to come out. As our desires come into direct conflict with the desires of another person, things get downright hostile.
We fought the Gulf War because Saddam Hussein wanted the rich oil fields of Kuwait. Phil and Diane fought the bedroom war over pork chops. They had invited another couple for dinner, and as Diane went out for the afternoon, she asked Phil to get the pork chops out of the freezer to thaw. He was working on the lawn mower and forgot. Dinnertime arrived, and Diane asked Phil to put the chops on the grill. He suddenly remembered that they were still hard as rocks in the freezer. You know the phrase “if looks could kill”? Diane couldn’t say what she wanted to say. Their guests were sitting right there, and she had an image to maintain. She let Phil have it with a look and later that night finished the job off when they were alone.
Søren Kierkegaard said that resentment is the “constituent principle” of the modern era, this simmering anger at our blocked desires. We shove them beneath the surface for as long as possible, only to have them erupt on the freeway, in the classroom, or at home in a burst of physical or verbal retaliation. Our anger is rarely proportionate to the event. I yelled at my five-year-old son, Luke, at dinner tonight because he was being disrespectful to his mom. But is that all that was behind my stern rebuke? Aren’t events like that the triggers, opening the doors to a reservoir of disappointment we pretend for the most part we have risen above? We try to get beyond the pain of desire by burying it, but it does not go away. It surfaces in other ways.
And so, Scripture says, we find ourselves in a civil war of desire. The horrors of this war go well beyond spoiled dinners and a little marital tension. We will sacrifice anything on the altar of our anger, the rage that is slowly building from a lifetime of thwarted desire—our marriages, our child’s self-esteem, someone’s very life. At the same moment that Krakauer’s companions were battling for their lives on Everest’s southeast ridge, three Indian climbers were stranded by the storm on the other side of the mountain as they attempted the summit from the northeast. Unable to work their way down, they spent the night on the face of the mountain without shelter in a howling blizzard. The following morning, two Japanese climbers ascending by the same route came across the climbers, now near death. They offered no assistance; no food or water, no bottled oxygen. They didn’t even speak to them, but stepped aside and took their rest a few hundred feet beyond. The Japanese climbers made the summit; then they left the Indians to die as they passed them again on their way back down.
There is a reason Jesus chose lust and murder as examples of what happens when desire goes mad within us. He knew what our desperate hearts naturally do when our desires come into conflict. He knew to what lengths we would go to seek satisfaction of our soul’s hunger. For the battle of desire rages not only between us, but within us.
The Beast Within
Jeremy called and asked to see me to talk about “a little financial problem” he was having. I told him, sure, I could spare an hour of my Saturday. I thought he might need a small loan or some help with his checkbook. But when I saw the look on his face, I knew an hour wasn’t going to be enough. Jeremy’s little problem was that he had taken every credit card he owned to the limit, accumulating thousands of dollars in debt. Knowing he was unemployed at the time, with no prospect at all of paying off such a load, he was panic-stricken. “Good grief,” I asked, “how did it happen?” The story proved more outrageous than the debt. He had booked himself a week at a five-star resort. Posing as a wealthy physician, Jeremy entertained a variety of women—“gold diggers”—purchasing their affections with lavish gifts and gourmet dinners. By the end of his self-created fantasy island trip he had lost his integrity and about ten thousand dollars.
I would never have believed it unless he himself had told me, through tears of shame and regret. He is a quiet and unassuming man, the complete opposite of some jet-setting gigolo. No one would have dreamed he was capable of such a thing. But then again, we wonder: What am I capable of? Dare I even begin to feel my desire? We may not go so far, but we know that there is a ravenous beast within us. Years of living in an indifferent and often hostile world create a deep sense of unsettledness within us. A friend asked the other day: “How important are feelings of desire? I ask because I have a seeming overabundance of desire, but it sometimes goes astray in a crazed and hopeless pursuit of brownies or something of the sort.”
Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time. It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge. (Rom. 7:20–23 The Message)
For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. (Gal. 5:17 niv)
There is a nagging awareness inside us, warning that we’d better not feel our hunger too deeply or it will undo us. We might do something crazed, desperate. We are caught on the horns of a dilemma; our unmet desires are a source of trouble, and it feels as if it will get worse if we allow ourselves to feel how much we do desire. Not only that, we often don’t even know what we desire. Dan, a passionate young friend now finishing college, just sent this E-mail:
Chris McCandless wrote, “All hail the Phantom Bear, the beast within us all.” Well the “Bear” so to speak has really been growling loud as of late. I seem to be daily wanting more out of my life than what I have been living. Leo Tolstoy wrote, “I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in my quiet life.” And that really describes me well. I want more . . . more of God in my life . . . more intimacy with my friends . . . and I feel bad for wanting it. Everyone seems so content here and simple . . . and also I feel like I’m longing for nothing I’m certain of.
We try food, tennis, television, or sex, going from one thing to another, never quite finding satisfaction. The reason we don’t know what we want is that we’re so unacquainted with our desire. We try to keep a safe distance between our daily lives and our heart’s desire because it causes us so much trouble. We’re surprised by our anger and threatened by what feels like a ravenous bear within us. Do we really want to open Pandora’s box? If you remember the Greek myth, Pandora was the wife of Epimetheus, given to him by Zeus. The gods provided many gifts to her, including a mysterious box, which she was warned never to open. Eventually, her curiosity got the better of her, and she lifted the lid. Immediately, a host of evils flew out, plagues against the mind and body of mankind. She tried to close the box, but to no avail; the troubles had been loosed.
Dare we awaken our hearts to their true desires? Dare we come alive? Is it better, as the saying goes, to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? We’re not so sure. After
his divorce, a friend’s father decided to remain single the rest of his life. He told his son, “It’s easier to stay out than to get out.” Our dilemma is this: we can’t seem to live with desire, and we can’t live without it. In the face of this quandary most people decide to bury the whole question and put as much distance as they can between themselves and their desires. It is a logical and tragic act. The tragedy is increased tenfold when this suicide of soul is committed under the conviction that this is precisely what Christianity recommends. We have never been more mistaken.
Chapter Three
Dare We Desire?
Had you journeyed in those days through the barren lands, you might have seen the sea lion for yourself. Quite often in the evening, he would go and sit upon his favorite rock, a very large boulder, which lifted him off the burning sand and allowed him a view of the entire country.
There he would remain for hours into the night, silhouetted against the sky. And on the best nights, when the wind shifted to the east, a faint smell of salt air would come to him on the breeze. Then he would close his eyes and imagine himself once more at the sea. When he lay himself down to sleep, he would dream of a vast, deep ocean. Twisting and turning, diving and twirling, he would swim and swim and swim. When he woke, he thought he heard the sound of breakers.
The sea was calling to him.
But for real proof you must look at your own longings and aspirations; you must listen to the deep themes of your own life story.
—Gerald May
Longing is the heart’s treasury.
—Augustine
What do you want?
—Jesus of Nazareth
The shriveled figure lay in the sun like a pile of rags dumped there by accident. It hardly appeared to be human. But those who used the gate to go in and out of Jerusalem recognized him. It was his spot and had been for as long as anyone could remember. He was disabled, dropped off there every morning by someone in his family, and picked up again at the end of the day. Over the years, a sort of gallery of human brokenness gathered by the pool of Bethesda—the lame, the blind, the deaf, lepers, you name it. A rumor was going around that sometimes (no one really knew when) an angel would stir the waters, and the first one in would be healed. Sort of a lottery, if you will. And as with every lottery, the desperate gathered round, hoping for a miracle. So—technically speaking—the man was never alone. But it had been so long since anyone had actually spoken to him, he thought the question was meant for someone else. Squinting upward into the sun, he didn’t recognize the figure standing above him. The misshapen man asked the fellow to repeat himself; perhaps he had misheard. Although the voice was kind, the question felt harsh, even cruel.
“Do you want to get well?”
He sat speechless, blinking into the sun. Slowly, the words seeped into his consciousness, like a voice calling him out of a dream. Do I want to get well? Slowly, like a wheel long rusted, his mind began to turn over. What kind of question is that? Why else would I be lying here? Why else would I have spent every day for the past thirty-eight seasons lying here? He is mocking me. The man was familiar with mockery and had endured his share of ridicule. But now that his vision had adjusted to the glare, he could see the inquisitor’s face, his eyes. There was no hint of mockery. The face was as kind as the voice he heard. Apparently, the man meant what he said, and he was waiting for an answer. “Do you want to get well? What is it that you want?”
“Hey, there, you without the legs—what are you lying here for? Wouldn’t you love to get up, stretch yourself a bit, have a walk around?” Who dared ask something so callous? It was Jesus who posed the question, so there must be something we’re missing here. He is love incarnate. Why did he ask the paraplegic such an embarrassing question? Of course the fellow wanted to get well. You don’t have to be God to see the obvious. Or was it? As with most of the questions he posed, Jesus was probing for something we do not see. He knew the answer, of course—but did the man? Do we? Think of the fellow on the ground for a moment; put yourself, literally, in his shoes. His entire life has been shaped by his brokenness. All his days he has wanted one thing. Forget riches. Forget fame. Life for this man was captured in one simple, unreachable desire. When the other children ran and played, he sat and watched. When his family stood at the temple to pray, he lay on the ground. Every time he needed to have a drink or to go to the bathroom, someone had to pick him up and take him there.
So he had gone there for the past thirty-eight years, hoping to hit the jackpot. Sure, it was a long shot, but it was all he had. At what point did he begin to lose hope? First a year, then two went by. Nothing, at least for him. Maybe someone else got a miracle; that would buy him some time. What about after five years with no results? Ten? How long can we sustain desire against continual disappointment? Some hold out longer than others, but eventually, we all move to a place of resignation or cynicism or bitterness. As the years rolled on, this man, like all of us, began to lose any vital heart-connection to what he wanted. He was present, but not accounted for. The calluses had formed—not in the heart of Jesus, but over the man’s heart. He had abandoned desire. Jesus took him back into the secret of his own heart. By asking him what he wanted, Jesus took the man back into his desire. Why?
It is where we must go if we are to meet God.
An Invitation to Desire
This may come as a surprise to you: Christianity is not an invitation to become a moral person. It is not a program for getting us in line or for reforming society. It has a powerful effect upon our lives, but when transformation comes, it is always the aftereffect of something else, something at the level of our hearts. At its core, Christianity begins with an invitation to desire. Look again at the way Jesus relates to people. As he did with the fellow at the Sheep Gate, he is continually taking them into their hearts, to their deepest desires.
The story of the two blind men on the road to Jericho repeats the theme. Jesus is passing by the spot where these two men have sat looking for a handout for who knows how long. They learn that Jesus is going by, and they cry out for him. Though the crowd tries to shut them up, they succeed in shouting over the ruckus and capturing the Master’s attention. The parade stops. Jesus steps to the side of the road, and standing there before him are two men, nothing clearer than the fact that they are blind. “What do you want me to do for you?” Again the question. Again the obvious that must not be so obvious after all.
Then there is the Samaritan woman whom Jesus meets at the well. She has come alone in the heat of the day to draw water, and they both know why. By coming when the sun is high, she is less likely to run into anyone. You see, her sexual lifestyle has earned her a “reputation.” Back in those days, having one partner after another wasn’t looked so highly upon. She’s on her sixth lover, and so she’d rather bear the scorching rays of the sun than face the searing words of the “decent” women of the town who come at evening to draw water. She succeeds in avoiding the women, but runs into God instead. What does he choose to talk to her about—her immorality? No, he speaks to her about her thirst: “If you knew the generosity of God and who I am, you would be asking me for a drink, and I would give you fresh, living water” (John 4:10 The Message). Remarkable. He doesn’t give a little sermon about purity; he doesn’t even mention it, except to say that he knows what her life has been like: “You’ve had five husbands, and the man you’re living with now isn’t even your husband” (John 4:18 The Message). In other words, now that we both know it, let’s talk about your heart’s real thirst, since the life you’ve chosen obviously isn’t working. “The water I give will be an artesian spring within, gushing fountains of endless life” (John 4:14 The Message).
Later in the gospel of John, Jesus extends the offer to anyone who realizes that his life just isn’t touching his deep desire: “If you are thirsty, come to me! If you believe in me, come and drink! For the Scriptures declare that rivers of living water will flow out from within” (John 7:37–38 nlt). His message wasn’t something new, but it confounded the religious leaders of the day. Surely, those scripturally learned Jews must have recalled God’s long-standing invitation to them, spoken seven hundred years earlier through the prophet Isaiah:
Come, all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread,
and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.
(Isa. 55:1–2 niv)
Somehow, the message had gotten lost by the time Jesus showed up on the scene. The Jews of his day were practicing a very soul-killing spirituality, a lifeless religion of duty and obligation. They had abandoned desire and replaced it with knowledge and performance as the key to life. The synagogue was the place to go to learn how to get with the program. Desire was out of the question; duty was the path that people must walk. No wonder they feared Jesus. He came along and started appealing to desire.
To the weary, Jesus speaks of rest. To the lost, he speaks of finding your way. Again and again and again, Jesus takes people back to their desires: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matt. 7:7 niv). These are outrageous words, provocative words. Ask, seek, knock—these words invite and arouse desire. What is it that you want? They fall on deaf ears if there is nothing you want, nothing you’re looking for, nothing you’re hungry enough to bang on a door over.
Jesus provokes desire; he awakens it; he heightens it. The religious watchdogs accuse him of heresy. He says, “Not at all. This is the invitation God has been sending all along.” He continues,
You have your heads in your Bibles constantly because you think you’ll find eternal life there. But you miss the forest for the trees. These Scriptures are all about me! And here I am, standing right before you, and you aren’t willing to receive from me the life you say you want. (John 5:39–40 The Message)
Life in All Its Fullness
Eternal life—we tend to think of it in terms of existence that never comes to an end. And the existence it seems to imply—a sort of religious experience in the sky—leaves us wondering if we would want it to go on forever. But Jesus is quite clear that when he speaks of eternal life, what he means is life that is absolutely wonderful and can never be diminished or stolen from you. He says, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10 niv). Not, “I have come to threaten you into line,” or “I have come to exhaust you with a long list of demands.” Not even, “I have come primarily to forgive you.” But simply, My purpose is to bring you life in all its fullness. Dallas Willard writes in The Divine Conspiracy,
Jesus offers himself as God’s doorway into the life that is truly life. Confidence in him leads us today, as in other times, to become his apprentices in eternal living. “Those who come through me will be safe,” he said. “They will go in and out and find all they need. I have come into their world that they may have life, and life to the limit.”
In other words, eternal life is not primarily duration but quality of life, “life to the limit.” It cannot be stolen from us, and so it does go on. But the focus is on the life itself. “In him was life,” the apostle John said of Jesus, “and that life was the light of men” (John 1:4 niv). Notice that the people who aren’t so good at keeping up with the program but who are very aware of their souls’ deep thirst are captured by Jesus’ message. Common folk tear the roofs off houses to get to him. They literally trample each other in an effort to get closer to this man. I’ve never seen anyone acting like this in order to get a chance to serve on some church committee or to hear a sermon on why dancing is “of the devil.” People act like this when it’s a matter of life and death. Crowds trample each other to get out of a burning building; they press into the mob to reach a food line. When life is at stake and the answer is within reach, that’s when you see human desire unmasked in all its desperation.
The Pharisees miss the boat entirely. Their hearts are hardened by the very law they claimed would bring them life. They put their hope in rules and regulations, in knowing and doing things perfectly. Having killed their souls’ thirst with duty, they went on to kill their souls’ only Hope, thinking they were doing their duty.
Good News That’s Not Really
Things appear to have come full circle. The promise of life and the invitation to desire have again been lost beneath a pile of religious teachings that put the focus on knowledge and
performance.
History has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally. (The Divine Conspiracy)
Thus Willard describes the Gospels we have today as “gospels of sin management.” Sin is the bottom line, and we have the cure. Typically, it is a system of knowledge or performance, or a mixture of both. Those in the knowledge camp put the emphasis on getting our doctrine in line. Right belief is seen as the means to life. Desire is irrelevant; content is what matters. But notice this—the Pharisees knew more about the Bible than most of us ever will, and it hardened their hearts. Knowledge just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you are familiar with the biblical narrative, you will remember that there were two special trees in Eden—the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. We got the wrong tree. We got knowledge, and it hasn’t done us much good. T. S. Eliot lamented,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
(“Choruses from the Rock”)
Christianity is often presented as essentially the transfer of a body of knowledge. We learn about where the Philistines were from, and how much a drachma would be worth today, and all sorts of things about the original Greek. The information presented could not seem more irrelevant to our deepest desires.
Then there are the systems aimed at getting our behavior in line, one way or another. Regardless of where you go to church, there is nearly always an unspoken list of what you shouldn’t do (tailored to your denomination and culture, but typically rather long) and a list of what you may do (usually much shorter—mostly religious activity that seems totally unrelated to our deepest desires and leaves us only exhausted).
And this, we are told, is the good news. Know the right thing; do the right thing. This is life? When it doesn’t strike us as something to get excited about, we feel we must not be spiritual enough. Perhaps once we have kept the list long enough, we will understand.
We don’t need more facts, and we certainly don’t need more things to do. We need Life, and we’ve been looking for it ever since we lost Paradise. Jesus appeals to our desire because he came to speak to it. When we abandon desire, we no longer hear or understand what he is saying. But we have returned to the message of the synagogue; we are preaching the law. And desire is the enemy. After all, desire is the single major hindrance to the goal—getting us in line. We are told to kill desire and call it sanctification. Or as Jesus put it to the Pharisees, “You load people down with rules and regulations, nearly breaking their backs, but never lift even a finger to help” (Luke 11:46 The Message). As a result, Willard says, “The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made.”
“I began to seriously question my faith,” wrote a friend, “when I was suffering my second year of depression. People in church saw my depressed face, and they complimented me on how I was such a good Christian.” I am not making this up. This poor fellow was actually cheered for doing well spiritually when it became apparent his soul was dying. “I thought the best way for a person to live is to keep his desires to a minimum so that he will be prepared to serve God.” Isn’t that the message? It may not be explicit (what we truly believe rarely is), but it’s clear enough. Get rid of desire, and get with the program.
Compare the shriveled life held up as a model of Christian maturity with the life revealed in the book of Psalms:
You have made known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.
(16:11 niv)
As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
(42:1–GIN-RIGHT: 0px" align="left">O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
My soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land,
where there is no water.
(63:1 niv)
Ask yourself, Could this person be promoted to a position of leadership in my church? Heavens, no. He is far too unstable, too passionate, too desirous. It’s all about pleasure and desire and thirst. And David, who wrote most of the psalms, was called by God a “man after his own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14 niv).
Christianity has nothing to say to the person who is completely happy with the way things are. Its message is for those who hunger and thirst—for those who desire life as it was meant to be. Why does Jesus appeal to desire? Because it is essential to his goal: bringing us life. He heals the fellow at the pool of Bethesda, by the way. The two blind men get their sight, and the woman at the well finds the love she has been seeking. Reflecting on these events, the apostle John looked at what Jesus offered and what he delivered and said, “He who has the Son has life” (1 John 5:12 niv).
The Story of Desire
We misunderstand the good news Jesus announced when we hear it outside the story God is telling. Good news, a report that brings us relief and joy at the same time, is news that speaks to our dilemma. Hearing from your doctor that the lump is benign is good news. Receiving a notice from the IRS that you will not be audited after all is good news. Getting a call from the police to say that they’ve found your daughter is good news. Being offered tips and techniques for living a more dutiful life isn’t even in the field of good news. We know in our hearts that our dilemma cannot be, “I sure wish I could be a more decent chap. What I really need is a program to improve my morals.” Now, Jesus seemed to think that what he was offering really and truly spoke to our dilemma. Those who grasped what he was saying agreed. So what is our dilemma? What do we need most desperately to hear? Where are we in the story?
Let us ask the storytellers. In many ways, Hollywood has mastered the art of speaking to the human predicament. Consider the success of James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic. Not only did it sweep the Oscars, but the movie has become the all-time leading box office hit, passing even Gone with the Wind. Ticket sales have reached nearly $2 billion. I know people who have seen it not once or twice, but multiple times. It is a phenomenon whose appeal surpassed generational and cultural boundaries. Why? Christian critiques of the film missed the mark entirely, focusing almost exclusively on moral issues (sin management brought to film review). I cannot help thinking that if those reviewers were at the well when the Samaritan woman came by, they would have given her an earful.
But much more is going on here. Obviously, the film touched a nerve; it tapped into the reservoir of human longing for life. What is its story line? The film begins with romance, a story of passionate love, set within an exciting journey. Those who saw Titanic will recall the scene early in the film where the two lovers are standing on the prow of the great ship as it slices through a golden sea into a luscious sunset. Romance, beauty, adventure. Eden. The life we’ve all been searching for because it’s the life we all were made for. Have we forgotten—or never been told? Once upon a time, in the beginning of humanity’s sojourn on earth, we lived in a garden that was exotic and lush, inviting and full of adventure. It was “the environment for which we were made,” as the sea lion was made for the sea. Now, those of you who learned about Eden in Sunday school maybe missed something here. Using flannel graphs to depict Paradise somehow doesn’t do it. Picture Maui at sunset with your dearest love. A world of intimacy and beauty and adventure.
But then tragedy strikes. I’m sure I won’t ruin the story for anyone if I tell you the ship goes down. How awful, how haunting are those scenes of the slow but irreversible plunge of the great ocean liner, leaving behind a sea of humanity to freeze to death in the Arctic waters. Everything is gone—the beauty, the romance, the adventure. Paradise is lost. And we know it. More than ever before, we know it. There was a time earlier in this century when we believed in the future, in something called progress. Not anymore, especially not the younger generations. I have yet to meet a young person who believes that his life will be better in a few years. As Chesterton said, we all somehow know that we are the “survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.” The ship has gone down. We are all adrift in the water, hoping to find some wreckage to crawl upon to save ourselves.
But that is not all. The secret of the film’s success is found in the final scene. As the camera takes us once more to the bottom of the sea and we are given a last look at the rotting hulk of the once great ship, something happens. The Titanic begins to transform before our eyes. Light floods in through the windows. The rust and decay melt away as the pristine beauty of the ship is restored. The doors fly open, and there are all the great hearts of the story, not dead at all, but quite alive and rejoicing. A party is under way; a wedding party. The heroine, dressed in a beautiful white gown, ascends the staircase into the embrace of her lover. Everything is restored. Tragedy does not have the final word. Somehow, beyond all hope, Paradise has been regained.
Isn’t this our dilemma? Isn’t this the news we have been longing for? A return of the life we prize? Look again at what Jesus offers. There is bread enough for everyone. There is healing for every brokenness. The lost are found. The weary are given rest. There is life available—life to the limit.
I am the Gate. Anyone who goes through me will be cared for—will freely go in and out, and find pasture. A thief is only there to steal and kill and destroy. I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of. (John 10:9–10 The Message)
Desire and Goodness
But doesn’t Christianity condemn desire—the Puritans and all that? Not at all. Quite the contrary. Christianity takes desire seriously, far more seriously than the Stoic or the mere hedonist. Christianity refuses to budge from the fact that man was made for pleasure, that his beginning and his end is a paradise, and that the goal of living is to find Life. Jesus knows the dilemma of desire, and he speaks to it in nearly everything he says.
When it comes to the moral question, it is not simply whether we say yes or no to desire, but always what we do with desire. Christianity recognizes that we have desire gone mad within us. But it does not seek to rectify the problem by killing desire; rather, it seeks the healing of desire, just as it seeks the healing of every other part of our human being.
“Two things contribute to our sanctification,” wrote Pascal. “Pains and pleasures.” And while we know that our journey is strewn with danger and difficulty, “the difficulties they meet with are not without pleasure, and cannot be overcome without pleasure.” Where do you find Jesus saying, “The problem with you people is, you want too much. If you’d just learn to be happy with less, we’d all get along just fine”? Not anywhere. Quite the contrary. “My commands are for your good,” he says, “always.”
Something has gone wrong in us, very wrong indeed. So wrong that we have to be told that joy is found not in having another man’s wife, but in having our own. But the point is not the law; the point is the joy. Need I say more than this: modern Christianity has brought an entire group of people to the point where they have to be told that sex is, in the words of one book, “intended for pleasure.”
God is realistic. He knows that ecstasy is not an option; we are made for bliss, and we must have it, one way or another. He also knows that happiness is fragile and rests upon a foundation greater than happiness. All the Christian disciplines were formulated at one time or another in an attempt to heal desire’s waywardness and so, by means of obedience, bring us home to bliss. Walter Brueggemann suggests that faith on its way to maturity moves from “duty to delight.” If it is not moving, then it has become stagnant. If it has changed the goal from delight to duty, it has gone backward; it is regressing. This is the great lost truth of the Christian faith, that correction of Judaism made by Jesus and passed on to us: the goal of morality is not morality—it is ecstasy. You are intended for pleasure!
Who, Then, Can Be Saved?
Look again at the story Jesus told about the prodigal son. It might be called the story of desire. Consider what each character does with his desire. You have the younger son, whose desires get him into a world of trouble. Then there is the father, whose desire for the lost boy is so deep that he sees him coming from a long way off—he has been watching, waiting. Forgiveness is assumed; it’s a given. He’s grateful just to have the boy home again. And then there is the older brother. He’s the party pooper, if you recall. His younger brother is “back from the dead,” as the father says, and the older brother won’t even come in for the celebration. He stands outside, sulking. Let’s pick up the story there:
The older brother was angry and wouldn’t go in. His father came out and begged him, but he replied, “All these years I’ve worked hard for you and never once refused to do a single thing you told me to. And in all that time you never gave me even one young goat for a feast with my friends. Yet when this son of yours comes back after squandering your money on prostitutes, you celebrate by killing the finest calf we have.” His father said to him, “Look, dear son, you and I are very close, and everything I have is yours. We had to celebrate this happy day. For your brother was dead and has come back to life! He was lost, but now he is found!” (Luke 15:28–32 nlt)
The older brother is the picture of the man who has lived his entire life from duty and obligation. When the wayward son returns from his shipwreck of desire, his brother is furious because he gets a party and not a trip behind the barn with the broadside of a paddle. He tells his father that he has been had; that all these years he hasn’t gotten a thing in return for his life of service. The father’s reply cuts to the chase: “All that is mine has always been yours.” In other words, “You never asked.” Rembrandt captures all this powerfully in his now-famous painting The Return of the Prodigal Son. In the painting, the elder brother stands a step above the reunion of father and son. He will not step down, enter in. He is above it all. But who receives redemption? The scandalous message of the story is this: those who kill desire—the legalists, the dutiful—are not the ones who experience the father’s embrace. The question is not, Dare we desire, but dare we not desire? |
