Desire as Paradox

A theme of 10 years of work

I am often asked questions about the launch of my (very modest) publishing career. I’m always honest to say that the story sounds more straightforward in the telling than in the living. As a retrospective, it has a quality of deliberate and decisive forward movement, as if I had clear ambitions and concrete plans. I did not. I was simply following one idea into another and another—and often feeling as if I were fumbling in the dark. Where, I wanted to ask, was the manual for doing this work and making this writing life? But as I have recently told two of my children, both recently graduated from college, uncertainty is a part of the vocational journey. You’re supposed to feel clumsy and unsure at every new beginning.

One thing that is certainly more clear today than at any previous point is how paradox is a central theme in all my books. This isn’t because I’m so fantastically insightful or precise. (I didn’t even know that my third book, Surprised by Paradox, was about paradox until my editor, reading an early chapter, told me so.) I remember another editor/friend asking me many years ago whether I'd ever thought to engage more nuance in my work. Those are the kinds of conversations you don’t forget—and they are the kinds of conversations that help you grow. I took to heart her advice that I needed to be a more careful thinker and to exercise a little more hesitation in making bold, brazen pronouncements about truth. I needed to learn to ask: what was I missing, ignoring, neglecting, under- or overstating?

Paradox, as a category of the both/and rather than the either/or, demands that we be hesitant about oversimplification and overstatement. It asks that we maintain the truth of two ideas that seem contradictory (and might forever be). To look back, not simply at Teach Us to Want, but the rest of my books is to see paradox everywhere: the both/and of home (Keeping Place); the both/and of faith (A Habit Called Faith); the both/and of time (In Good Time).

For our purposes here, I want to reflect primarily on the paradox of holy, human desire as I tried to explore it in Teach Us to Want. As far as I know, paradox, as a concept, doesn’t explicitly appear in the book. But desire is an irreducible both/and in the life of Christian life. There is both caution and call in our life of desiring. Caution: because we can’t always trust ourselves to want as God wants. Call: because inhabited by the Spirit of the living God, our desires are being renovated. Desire is a part of what it means to be gloriously—and ingloriously—human, which is to say that it can both lead us to God and lead us off a cliff.

To maintain the paradox of holy desire is to avoid two obvious errors. The first error is represented by the distorted cultural messaging around desire. To read most articles/books/posts today is to see that desire is accepted as a de facto good, as an expression of one’s true authenticity. Because authenticity is a supreme cultural good, so too is desire. According to this distortion, desire doesn’t need to be examined, interrogated, tested in community, or held against other higher ideals and systems beyond oneself. No, what you want is good because it is you who wants it. If you were to forbid yourself something you wanted, this would be a terrible transgression against the self. (And isn’t this the definition of sin as we have it today?) It would not simply be dishonest to go against your desires; it would be destructive in some irreversible way.

This, my friends, is a bunch of half-truth garbage. Should you pay your desires attention? Absolutely. Should you follow them blindly wherever they lead because you’ve got to live your truth? Only if you’ve got a spiritual death-wish. I need only think of a lonely weekend I spent last summer in a coastal city rereading divorce memoirs. I was missing my MFA graduation because of a COVID diagnosis, and the first thing I did when I turned the key of my AirBnb (because I’d been kicked out of the dorm) was to order a large pizza, which I ate alone and miserable. Given the disappointment, the loneliness—and did I mention the divorce memoirs?—I was cooking up worse schemes than gluttony. No, do not follow your desires wherever they lead—because you are not always reliably nice.

The first error, in our life of desire, is unchecked optimism. There may be a certain sense of obviousness to that error, perhaps, especially if you’ve spent even a little time in church. The second error—of forbiddance—is a little more pernicious. It posits all desire as selfish and sinful. This is generally the error of overly zealous religious people. They feel their lines of prohibition must be stricter than God’s if sanctification is to happen. They have so little faith in the good, deep, slow work that God is doing in his people, and they have so little imagination for the maturity of wisdom as it forms. They would rather avoid a risk rather than make a mistake. Their stringency becomes an ugly form of self-righteousness, and trust me: these aren’t people you want to keep close.

To be honest, this was me for so many years. I was deeply afraid that given an inch when it came to desire, I would take the unholy mile. I thought of sanctification, not as a hallowing of the self (and its inevitable life of desiring) but as a hollowing. All the bowels of my humanness would be spooned out, and I would be filled with one robotic desire and one desire alone: for the will of God.

Don’t get me wrong: I want to want the will of God more than anything else. But in rightly wanting the will of God, St. Augustine would say that this then orders our life of desire rather than obliterates it. In other words, if you want the will of God highest and best, it’s not that you stop wanting a husband or cat or vacation or friend or new job or even new shoes. You just know the relative value of each of these things as compared with God. You can be content without them, yes. And you can also look to God for all that is needful and good.

It’s tiresome, I have to say, to hear the sloppy ways people preach and teach about desire in the church. They make you feel bad simply for being human, as if you’re to exist on some ethereal plane of ancient Stoicism or Buddhist detachment rather than live in the created world God made and called good. Yes, we were made to want by a God who wanted for us a world that isn’t simply useful but beautiful.

Here’s the thing: I’ve begun to see the deep work of transformation God wants to do in us as he moves us into a life of holy desire. This isn’t the same thing as reflexive desire (error 1). And this isn’t the same thing desire-less obedience (error 2). It’s the Spirit-led change that happens when we might not naturally want the cross that Jesus asks us to carry and yet discover, in carrying it, that it is truly our joy.

Yesterday, for example, was my mother’s birthday. She turned 79. If you’ve read In Good Time, you’ll know something of our story of leaving Toronto, where we lived for 11 years, and returning to the States to care for her. In brief, my mother and I have never had a close relationship. The last fifteen years, in fact, have been marked by frustration and even anger. Now, imagine that God has called me to see her through the long Lent of Alzheimer’s and to honor her as my mother. To forgive, though there will be no visible repair because such work is impossible now. To show mercy, as I have been shown mercy. Trust me, friends: this is not work I can do by any natural strength, and in it, I am more impatient and bitter than I want to admit.

But let me also bear witness to another dimension of the story as it unfolds. I am also given love and creativity and joy and patience beyond my natural resources. I show up with cinnamon rolls and flowers on the morning of her birthday, and when I don’t find her in her apartment, search the building. When, later in the day, I’ve gone home and come back again, to pick her up for afternoon errands and a special birthday dinner, she gets in the car and asks if I know who brought her a beautiful bouquet of flowers.

“Those were from me,” I say. “Do you remember seeing you this morning.”

She looks astonished. “I saw you this morning?”

“You did. And I brought cinnamon rolls. Do you remember that we sat on the patio with Carol and Rena and Shirley?”

She is quiet. “I guess I forgot.”

She has forgotten, and I am irritated. But I am also not giving up. I am wanting to want to honor her, which surely has to mean something.