We pick up our walk through the moral life with the 23rd Psalm as our guide, coming to this question of desire. Having begun in the beginning, with the LORD who is the shepherd, the one among us, we began two weeks ago to seek out what that relation between the self and the LORD is: one of desire. The moral life is not all command and obligation, as if we did what we do without any skin in the game. As Augustine reminded us over and over again, the Christian life is one of desire, of knowing the world as a series of unfufilled longings not for some other world, but of God, the heart of the world.1 As the deer thirsts for water, the Psalmist writes, so we thirst for God, the living water analogous to liquid refreshment, and sleep the analogue to finding our rest in God.
Desire, then, is not a bad thing, and not something to be apologized for. Apart from desire, we would want nothing, not even good things, not even God. But desire, it seems, is constitutive of the structure of what it means to be a human: we intend things, and to see them through, desire not just the beginning but the outcome; we move from day to day by answering the call of good desires (of the body and soul) and refusing the desires that are all-consuming, confusing satiation with the thing itself: lust, idolatry, greed. There is no way out of desire, and no need to apologize for it, for desire is the language of motion, and the difference between dragged around by our noses and hearing the call of Lady Wisdom. For the psalmist to say that they do not want is not to say that desire is eternally extinguished, for absent desire, we remain still and motionless, unmoved even by God. For the psalmist to say that they do not want is to say that, the shepherd-LORD is the face and shape of good desiring, satisfied perpetually.
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My family’s life is fairly modest. We shop at Wal-Mart for groceries, pack our lunches, watch our credit card bills. And yet last week, Sarah and I were at an all-inclusive resort, the kind you should probably save for occasions such as her impending 40th birthday, and the kind that still charges 30$ for a bottle of sunscreen. It was a surreal kind of environment in which every whim for food or drink could be met with a good option, within the limits of a market economy in which a labor force still provides the food and seasons still dictate what will be served. There was a lot of laying around, sleeping, and slow discussions about things which escape conversation in the daily grind.
The paradox of an all-inclusive is that someone still does the dishes. Not every desire is met, nor should they be, as we were in the state of Quintana Roo, with all of the Mexican laws in force. And even menus were promissory notes, awaiting daily shipments of fruit, menu items, and wait staffs.2 The desire for another drink is abated by the fact that the sun beats down and advises you otherwise; the desire to stay up all night and karaoke is thwarted by a staff who really does want to go home and sleep before the next day’s shift. The desire economy of the all-inclusive does a fairly good job of hiding most of these nuts and bolts, creating the illusion of an endless supply, but the fact that the various restaurants all had menus breaks the spell. And so, the difference between normal life and the all-inclusive fades—the mechanisms for our desires being met just becomes more invisible.
The illusion of the all-inclusive is that it really does meet our desires: for rest, for good food, for space, for time. Why else do people keep going back? What we seek only comes to us through desire, such that desire is not the villain but how those desires get met. The trick is that these desires ultimately only find their proper shape in the kingdom come, where the valleys are filled in and the mountains razed, one in which we learn that desires met involves being fed and feeding, eating and washing dishes, serving that we may be served.
In this desire for more just desires, we are invited into a bottomless pit. Both lust and love teach us this: a desire, one satisfied once, wants to be satisfied again. Our desire, shaped by that given by the Shepherd-LORD, takes us, we will find, into green grasses, a flowing stream, a banquet, all in the company of both the LORD and our enemies. For unless our desire encompasses those who we would keep out of the feast, our desire is not yet complete. It is not without reason that the context of this picture of desiring—the stream—is one which is always running, dry and more flush, but always running.
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Reading: Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. I’d not read Stegner before and took it on vacation on a whim. If you have ever had a decades-long friend, this is your book to read and give thanks. Justin E.H. Smith’s The Internet is Not What You Think is starting off very promising, offering an intellectual account of communication and knowledge, different from the technical versions of Internet-wariness.
Writing: Last week could not have been a better time to be away from writing, as it was the week that the Southern Baptist Convention released the report about sexual abuse that everyone already knew was going to be horrific. And that was before children in Uvalde were murdered. To both of these, there are words to be written, but first, prayers and gnashing of teeth. Sometimes that which we desire—a world of safety and peace—is easier than we pretend, borrowing fake problems as obstacles to overcoming mass murder.
Events such as these defy description of their impact, and are best approached first in lament. But, ultimately, something must be said. Later this week, I’ll be writing on why “being disturbed” isn’t a moral argument. Part of my reason for doing this newsletter at all is that there’s a lot of emotivism masquerading as moral thinking. There’s a ton of facile thinking when it comes to ethics, but the argument of feelings-as-argument is some of the worst. Give me ten thousand people who argue based on inviolable rules over one person who’s argument is one of affect.
This is where C.S. Lewis, one of the most popular modern readers of Augustine, goes wrong, when he writes in Mere Christianity that ““If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” This is, on the face, to place God and creation in opposition to one another, whereas the Psalmist (and Augustine) see that the only way to God is through the world, that our desires are met as we see God in the land of the living. That God, of course, is Jesus, the one who took on flesh, and the Spirit, who dwells within our mortal bodies.
Tip well, even at places where you’re paying a lot per night.