"All our desires ultimately lead us to God." Janet Ruffing
The journey of desire may lead us to byways and cul-de-sacs . . . We may not know what it is we long for but our deepest longings are God-given because they always point toward the Divine.Knowing Our Desires
Can it really be that the things I most deeply want point me toward God? Can it be that these same things tell me something about what God most deeply wants for me? Can it be true that my desires reflect in some important ways God’s own desires?
I suspect there are a number of reasons why we doubt this. First, most of us have been conditioned to expect that we will never get the things we most deeply want. Our deepest desires and longings are, therefore, simply setups for frustration. They are dangerous. Consequently, they remain unexamined and unknown. They may unconsciously point us toward God, but if they do, we would not be any more aware of that fact than of their essential nature.
Beyond this, most of us harbor a deep seated suspicion that God’s desires for us and ours for ourselves share no common ground. We suspect that if our desires are to be fulfilled it will be at the expense of God’s—fulfillment that will have to be stolen from God. Christian spirituality, we mistakenly believe, has to do with the crucifixion of our desires—possibly of desire in general.
As a result, most of us do not know our deepest desires. We may know our superficial wants (“I want a new car” or “I want a holiday,” etc.) but not our deeper longings. Unfortunately, the superficial wants and desires we can most easily identify are often those that are most disordered and most in need of purification. This only reinforces our sense that our desires are at best irrelevant to the spiritual journey, and at worst, seriously in opposition to it.
The only way to know our deepest desires is to start with the surface desires that we can access and follow them downward to their underlying longings. This, as we shall see, then allows us to identify those desires that are most in need of refining.
One way or another, our desires form and direct our spirit. Thomas Merton puts it this way: “Life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what your desire.”
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