View from the Vicarage

Discovering your Heart’s Desire

Is desire too heady a topic for a parish magazine article? Too risky? Where might desire take us? Buckle up for a few thoughts on desire.

Fundamentally, all humans desire love. Think of the gaze between infant and caregiver; the eye contact between lovers; the countless artistic expressions of the quest for love-poems, songs, artwork, dance. Lack of love causes illness. Images of orphans chained to their cots rocking back and forth in distress come to mind, development arrested through a lack of love.

Loneliness can increase blood pressure and sugar levels, and lead to poor sleep, heart issues and a weakened immune system. Google it. I did. Of all the forms of love, there is one that is foundational. It’s the desire that the Psalmist expresses so eloquently.

‘As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God’
(Psalm 42:1).

Saint Augustine wrote in his confessions: ‘Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in God.’ Ultimately God reaches the parts no other desire can reach. The words of the collect for purity are resonant:

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid…

Human desire can be messed up and muddled – and God knows this. So, let’s be honest with ourselves. Why worship a golden calf in whatever form, when you can worship the one who brings all life into being and who is the source of all love?

Underneath the false starts and mistaken obsessions of desire derailed, is the genuine desire for God, for the worth conferred by knowing that we are seen by God and loved beyond measure. When we listen to the inner voice of love and really attend, it cries for the one who made us and in whom all desire is fulfilled. Fulfilment of the desire for God is dynamic-we never ‘arrive’ – because there is always more of God to discover, to experience, to know.

Perhaps we can get a little too satisfied, a little too cozy with the god we know, content in the safe routines and ways of worship. Perhaps we cling too much to the old familiar ways when God is always inviting us out into deeper water and new discovery. Perhaps when we are too at ease in Zion, God comes and provokes us into restlessness so that we might seek more, find more, grow more and be more. More our truest selves, and our best communities, where loneliness is banished and all desires are known.

Summer Blessings

Reverend Paul