Lent & Desire
“They did eat and were well filled, for the Lord gave them their own desire: they were not disappointed of their lust.”
– Quinquagesima communion verse
There is a famous passage in C.S. Lewis’s essay, “The Weight of Glory,” in which he writes about desire:
“. . . it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Lewis deftly articulates a common struggle in the human relationship with desire. We claim to want things. We claim to want things, or other people, or aspirations, or money (the list goes on), so badly that the desire we feel drives us crazy, or drives us to violence, or makes us miserable. But if Lewis is right, nearly all of these desires are, in the end, hardly stronger than a child’s desire to play in mud.
We are creatures made to want God. Our desire for God, when well-ordered, keeps us moving toward him. This desire is the strongest desire that lives in us. It is beautiful, but difficult. God is, after all, not capable of being fully known by our finite selves (and if our desires for earthly realities can wound us so deeply, how much more can our desire for God devastate us?). Our desire for Him cuts to the core of who we are. It can be painful. It can bewilder us. Responding to this desire by choosing to seek God compels us to come to terms with who we truly are, and then to let God change us in the deepest parts of ourselves.
Which is perhaps why we so often distract ourselves from our desire for God, often with other desires that seem easier. In Lent, we fast to become hungry, to cut down on distractions and learn to see our hunger more clearly. We aim to see the foolish and sinful directions in which, in our waywardness, we have allowed our desires to bend. But we are also making space for the true depth of our hunger for God. As we quiet ourselves and make space for this God-bound hunger, we are perhaps embarrassed to find, as Lewis puts it, that we have been far too easily pleased by other things.
Our desire for God challenges us, it takes us to the edge of ourselves, it even causes us pain. But the ultimate object of our desire – God, made known to us in Christ – always offers Himself to us. What is Calvary – the place toward which we walk in Lent – other than the fullness of God in Christ requiting our longing with the entire gift of himself?
Lent gives us time to prepare to receive this gift. We are letting God reveal our longing to us, and he is making us ready to have our deepest longing – our hunger for Him – revealed, met, and deepened.