Lent 2023 | Week 3: The Life Giving Magic of Tidying Up Our Desires

The Multiplicity of Desires

Throughout this season of Lent, we have been looking at the role desire plays in the Christian life. In particular, we want to answer the question, “What is it that I want?”

Part of what makes this question so difficult to answer is the multiplicity of desires that we find competing within us. We want many things and often times we don’t have any criteria to help us order or rank those desires. Our lives end up being overrun by too many desires.

One rubric we have introduced to help tame our desires is to categorize them as thin or thick. Thin desires are those that are here today gone tomorrow. They are attached to things we want that are short-lived, transitory, fleeting. Our closets are filled with the pursuit of our thin desires.

Thick desires, on the other hand, carry more weight. They have to do with the things that really matter to us. They matter more but are harder to quantify. Here we have in mind things like giving ourselves for the sake others, of caring for the least of these, of loving God and neighbor.

To have faith in God is to say that these thicker desires are the desires awakened in us by the work of the Spirit through the ministry of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. In short, our deepest desires are addressed by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

When our thin desires out pace our thick desires this is what Jesus calls living on bread alone. It is what so much of our capitalistic economy is based around. Chasing after bread. Bread in all its forms. So many it is hard to count.

Ours is a culture in which our desire for bread is multiplied to a dizzying degree.

Lent is a time to do some spring cleaning. Like our offices and homes, our hearts, the seat and sanctum of our desires, can get disorganized and overrun by over-accumulation. And so it would do us well to take a look at all the desires that have accumulated in us and take stock of how, perhaps, our thin desires have run amuck, leaving little or no room for our thick ones.

The Christian name for this kind of tidying up is the life-changing magic of renunciation.

Renunciation

Take some time and read this short blog post by Christian psychologist Richard Beck. In it he talks about renunciation and why it is necessary in terms of fulfilling our thicker desires – namely, to love God and neighbor. The big question for us is:

• What are the desires in our lives that need to be renounced in order to free us up to love?

Scripture

We come again to Matthew 20:20-28. It is interesting to note that Jesus, here, does not eschew the disciples’ desire to be great. To be great, in a sense, is to be exceedingly good. And this is a good thing.

The problem is not our desire to be great, but the multitude of visions of what greatness (or goodness) looks like. Which brings us back to the multiplicity of desires in our life. To believe in a crucified God is to have a radically singular vision of greatness, which provides us criteria to help tidy up (renounce) the many competing visions of greatness constantly being sold to us.

None of this works, however, unless we see faith and desire as more or less synonymous. To have faith in Jesus is to say everything that is worth wanting is found in Jesus. This is the logic of verse 28, “just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” We serve others “just as” Jesus did. But this “just as” holds no power unless we have found it to be true that all our deepest desires find their fulfillment in this one who came not to be served, but to serve.

If our faith in Jesus does not hold our desires, then everything that Jesus asks of us will feel like duty and obligation. Following Jesus will amount to the never ending frustration of our desires.

• Does the Christian life feel like a constant frustration of your desires?
• As the great theologian Marie Kondo says, “The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t.” How might tidying up your desires help you see that what you truly desire is found in Jesus?

Idolatry is Always Polytheism

Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires; in refusing to await the time of promise, his life story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth.

Pope Francis

Can you relate to the experience of feeling like your life is a “myriad of unconnected instants”? I can’t think of a better way to describe the experience mediated to us through social media. Scrolling through Instagram is pretty much scrolling through “a myriad of unconnected instants.”

The alternative is to find ourselves part of a journey. A journey is one in which our wandering is given a direction and end; a “fundamental orientation” as Pope Francis puts it. The irony is that many of us probably feel the same about our faith as we do about social media. It too feels like a path “leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth”.

• Brass tacks: Do you experience your faith as a journey or as “a myriad of unconnected instants”?

Part of my own journey, I think, has been to identify how limiting the lesser forms of Truth, Goodness and Beauty (facts, legalism and entertainment, respectively) are to the Christian faith. Moving beyond facts to Story (a truthful story), beyond rules to Character (the character of Christ) and beyond entertainment to Beauty (the beauty of a crucified God) is what helps us find some kind of unifying vision for life. This work of moving “beyond” is not easy. It is one we all embark on together. It is for this work that God gave us the community we call church.