What Do You Want?
On desire, naming, and what longing is actually telling us
Human Be(com)ing explores how to desire better, decide wisely, and act differently in an often overwhelming and bewildering age. (Click through to read on the web if your email cuts off!)
In our pragmatic, goal-focused moment, desire holds a utilitarian value, so long as it fuels a story of victory. It’s a problem and a solution, a way to say “I believed I could, so I did.” We mine our deepest selves for the treadmill of achievement, and lose what makes us alive to the world around us.
But desire is not a resource to mine, nor a path to triumph.
Desire is what makes us dream, hope, pursue. Makes us human.
What DO You Want?
The blind beggar Bartimaeus shouts from the crowd, shouts to be heard above the beggars, travelers, hawkers, and followers, shouts “Have mercy on me!” In the midst of the teeming, chattering humanity, he shouts and Yeshua turns. Turns and says directly to the blind beggar Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?”1
A woman approaches, kneels, waits amid the clamor and bustle, waits for the opportune moment when Yeshua notices her. Waits to ask for glory on her sons above all others. “What is it you want?”2
James and John, disciples, followers, leaders, separate themselves from the group, leveling a request, a demand: “Do for us whatever we ask. Give us thrones by your side in your kingdom.” Yeshua sits, gazes on them. “What do you want me to do for you?”3
The invalid of thirty-eight years waits, patiently and less so, for a spot at the pool, waits to be cleansed, waits for a moment of peace, waits to be noticed, for he never is. Until Yeshua notices and asks, “Do you want to be well?”4
What do you want?
This question was always there in the text, but I only recently had my eyes opened to it.
I hadn’t seen before how simple and profound that question is, hadn’t realized that Jesus actually cares about what we want, that he knows us as persons with lives and desires and dreams and challenges, and that he understands how desires can be simple or ridiculous, and also just ours.
And it’s not just, or only, that Jesus asks, but that we’re seen with our desires. It’s not just that he asks, “what do you want?” It’s that the question is the seeing. He’s already looking before he asks. He’s already curious about who we are. He doesn’t demand that we make a case for our desire first, that we justify it. He recognizes the person as someone with a real answer worth hearing.
He doesn’t wait for us to clean up, to get it right. He simply asks, “What do you want?” And he leaves the answer to be what it is.
What We Were Taught About Desire
But the message so many of us got, spoken or not, is that what we want isn’t trustworthy, isn’t good. That anything we could want should be supplanted by what God wants, or what society deems appropriate. We learned or assumed that these wants were directly opposed to each other.
So if desire was the problem — suspicious, selfish, spiritually dangerous, the source of human suffering — what was the solution? Some traditions, such as Stoicism and Buddhism, offer desire management; the shifts and changes of desire call for reduction, detachment, suppression. Avoid what you want, or resign yourself to never really getting it. Christianity holds both asceticism and intensification: either ignore or punish desire, or redirect and channel it toward divine ends. We also frequently mistake the sating of appetites for the enjoyment of desire, and we have a lot of history (and experience) to show us what happens when we follow appetite wherever it leads: want, get, repeat. These days, that following can sound like: “I want it, therefore I owe it to myself to have it.” All of these approaches are paths of refusal: to listen, to question, to live with the wanting. They treat desire as the end of the matter, a problem to solve, and then be done with it.
If the typical approaches to desire refuse to take it seriously, what’s left? What do we do with what we want? We take seriously that desire might actually be the beginning of things, that our desires might be telling us something worth listening to.
Among the Stars
I confess that I feel wary about approaching the heart of this essay. I feel as though I’m approaching what C.S. Lewis calls the “inconsolable secret” that each of us carries within: that deep-down glimmer and gleam in our spirit, that ember slow-burning in our bellies, that shapes and colors every experience we have in this life.
Desire, yearning, longing. Sometimes we experience this so keenly we feel sick with it, faint with the force of it. It drives us out into the world, seeking glory, following beauty, pushing the boundaries of what we know and feel.
Sometimes the only way we know to deal with desire is to acquire, amass, devour the resources that appear to quench and alleviate the feeling. Consuming often feels safer, easier to manage. If we can grasp it, wrap our hands around it, is it truly so powerful? If we can cut it down to size, then maybe we wouldn’t have to admit how risky it feels to hold such infinite desire within us, how vulnerable it makes us to admit that there may be nothing in this world that could satisfy such longing.
And that is true.
The ember that fuels our clay-made bodies comes from that first kiss at the dawn of time, when the God who shaped the heavens and set the stars in motion breathed a bit of those stars into the first human being. And that breath has moved through us all ever since. If we follow the word itself back to its roots in the Latin desiderare,5 we realize “our separation from the stars, and our quest to reach them again.”6
Mexican poet Octavio Paz once called desire “a shot fired in the direction of the world beyond,” for we are made out of and for divine desire. It is the place where God and human beings meet: a mutual reaching for “a horizon with the right amount of peril.”7 It acts as a signal, a doorway into the infinite, an attempt to punch a hole in the ceiling of a world that refuses to risk more than what we know.
In the end, all of our wantings move between the stars and the stones, a tether connecting the individual to the infinite.
Among the Stones
To think of desire this way feels inspiring; it feels overwhelming.
Life as a quest to return to the stars leads us to moments of beauty and connection, but life is also a trek among the stones, and desire can feel like a goad forcing us to cross those stones in bare feet.
Sometimes we try to make that crossing as though we barely even notice those sharp edges, the twisted ankles. We project strength, a facade of ease with every agonizing step, rather than risk the honesty of broken skin and blood-stained feet. We refuse to meet the hardness with tenderness.
Sometimes we find ourselves mired in grief during the crossing. The glimpses of beauty, the glimmer and gleam in our spirit, the wild yearning never finds its focus, its home. We grieve the loss of what never was, and never seems to be.
But as painful and risky as vulnerability and grief are, to feel and want nothing, to be indifferent to desire, turns that field of stones into a bed of poppies. We take the path of refusal once again, attempting to escape. We succumb to despair by telling ourselves that nothing matters, we’ll never make progress, things will never change, and we have only mindless, numbing distraction left to choose.
The Christian tradition borrowed the Greek word acedia, a sense of inertia or apathy, and connected it to spiritual health. At its core, acedia indicates “a lack of care, a failure of motivation and love.”8 And desire is, above all, love for a thing we can barely name.
We too often believe the absence of desire to be a better option
than the possibility of healed desire. A.J. Swoboda, The Gift of Thorns
Naming as Reorientation
“What do you want?”
We return to Yeshua’s question. Whether they sought a miracle or glory, answering it required the person to specifically describe what they wanted, to locate themselves somewhere on the field of stones, to acknowledge their reaching for the stars. Notice that the question doesn’t guarantee the response they’re seeking; Yeshua doesn’t promise a magical resolution to All the Things. But the question affirms the goodness of our wanting, the aliveness of our desire.
The question encourages us to name our longing.
For those of us who grew up in traditions that dismissed or denied desire, we have no idea what to call that ember within, the yearning that comes out sideways. The energy we burn trying to contain or redirect such yearning, the pressure of unnamed longings, begins to consume us.
Unless we name our desire, we cannot enter into relationship with it. And if we cannot name it, we cannot love it.
In naming what we want, we acknowledge that life among the stones has wounded us to the quick, made us vulnerable to a brokenness that overtakes all our efforts. In naming our desire, we refuse to let that brokenness have the last word.
Because we don’t desire the dull or inadequate, the wounds or the brokenness. We long for the way things are supposed to be, for what is good, true, and beautiful, for what desire tells us is coming.
But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. Romans 8:24-25
Notice how Yeshua responds to the namers in these stories: he meets them where they are. And he points them in a new direction.
This naming and reorientation doesn’t just change journeys. It connects us to ourselves, makes it possible for us to share both the ember and the wound. By inviting us to live with our desire, Yeshua assumes that we have “infinite capacities for life and love.”9 Capacity for signals possibility of.
Desire, once named, begins to take shape in what becomes purpose: our longing to see all things made new, our glimpse of eternity breaking into the present. Desire signals our capacity for the infinite; purpose is the struggle to make something of our lives with that desire.
When we make a home for ourselves, for our communities, our countries, we’re making a claim about what’s worth wanting, worth pursuing, worth creating. Every system we inhabit arises out of what we make of our collective desire, what we decide is worth enduring a barefoot walk through a field of stones, what we find in the stars worth reaching for.
Desire invites us to navigate between the stones and the stars, between despair and hope, between indifference and love. That work helps us define our purpose and the commitments we’re ready to make to ourselves, to each other.
The desires of our heart matter because […] they guide us toward
what we are called to be, to live, and to do. Dallas Willard
A quick-drawn breath. A stillness in the world.
Yeshua waits.
Waits for us to listen to the question, to notice the invitation, to name our desire. He waits for us to love our journey to the stars, the stones we pick up along the way, the paths we make out of our longing. Every lunge, leap, twirl, shuffle, skip, hop, dip, and crawl toward the infinite horizon is a movement of hope, a refusal to quench desire, and the insistence that it meet us on the way.
He waits for us to befriend our desire, and build something new.
Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.
Shalom,
Take a look at how you responded to last week’s SloDo. Has anything from this essay illuminated, transformed, or otherwise changed about your response?
Purpose > Goals suggested that we rethink the organizing horizon of our lives (eternity, rather than achievement). The Only Thing explored how we learn to listen to our lives, to name and befriend the disorienting and uncomfortable. In this essay, we ask the deeper question that shapes what we pursue and how we listen: what do you actually want?
This essay is in conversation with the following:
“The Weight of Glory,” by C.S. Lewis
“Evening,” by Rainer Maria Rilke
“What I Learned About Expressing My Desires to God In Three Conversations with Dallas Willard,” by Trevor Hudson
The Soul of Desire, Curt Thompson
Poetic Theology Ch.1-2, William Dyrness
The Gift of Thorns, A.J. Swoboda
The Restless Heart, Ronald Rolheiser
The Holy Longing, Ronald Rolheiser
Becoming By Beholding, Lanta Davis
Our Unforming, Cindy S. Lee
Desiring the Kingdom, Pt. 1, James K.A. Smith
“Longing,” Consolations, David Whyte
And this song played on repeat: “C.S. Lewis Song” by Brooke Fraser
Fun fact: the original quote made a boo-boo; it used the Latin word desidere, which I discovered actually means to sit, withdraw, or defecate. Which sent me into a tailspin of confusion until I learned that desiderare is the word related to the stars. From the lowest to the highest reaches…I’m sure someone could explore the tensions of that etymology.
Lanta Davis, Becoming By Beholding, p. 125
David Whyte, “Longing,” Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
ibid., pp. 136-137
Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart, p. 98