The Shamelessness of Desire

James 4:1-10

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? ²You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet^* something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. ³You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. ⁴Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. ⁵Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, ‘God^* yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us’? ⁶But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says,
‘God opposes the proud,
   but gives grace to the humble.’ 
⁷Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. ⁸Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.⁹Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection. ¹⁰Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

So at the suggestion of my good friend, Jarrod Shappell, I am reading “Holy Longing” by Ronald Rolheiser.  It is a fantastic book so far and it has given me some great categories for why I find myself in these cycles of dysfunction so often.  Rolheiser’s main thesis is that humans are filled with varying levels of passion (or in his words eros) and it is our jobs as followers of Christ, people who would like to join in the redemption of the world, to discipline our eros and make good with it.  Furthermore, what we do with our eros defines our spirituality.  I am finding it to be very similar to a chapter about lust in Rob Bell’s book, SexGod.

Those are two book suggestions right there, but this isn’t the purpose of this writing.  What I found to be either coincidental or evidence of the Holy Spirit was what happened last Sunday night.  The youth group that I pastor is currently going through the book of James and we just so happened to be on chapter 4 the same week that I began reading Rolheiser’s book.  After we read through the chapter, I opened the group up for discussion, and the second or third question was, “what does it mean that ‘God yearns jealously for the spirit?’”  Eventually the conversation went on and I asked, “What’s inside of you that God might be jealous for?”  Silence.  And then I rephrased the question, “What are you passionate about?”  Again Silence.  But this time the silence wasn’t because they didn’t understand the question, the silence was much more awkward than that.  And I kept pushing, “what are you passionate about?”  “What is your mind constantly fixated on?”  “What in this world do you want more than anything?”  Finally, one of my kids said jokingly, “a girlfriend…”  Everyone laughed and so did he and he quickly took it back but I knew he wasn’t really joking.  Then a few other guys confessed to the same thing, then someone else said “fame,” then another said “church,” and slowly and cautiously everyone revealed them.

The question I walked away with from that conversation is, “why are we so afraid to admit what it is we actually desire?”  Now, I agree that there are variety of things that people claim to be passionate about: Darfur, the homeless, coffee, music, comic books, and various forms of artistic expression or social justice.  But these things are all out there, they are tangible and they all carry with them varying levels of cool.  What I would like to argue is that for most people, they either are ashamed of their deepest desire or they don’t even know what it is.  It’s a secret, a dark shadow dwelling inside your soul; for the majority of us living in a consumer culture, this is the answer to St. James’ question at the beginning of James 4: “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from?”.

Every time we keep something in the darkness, the only thing that can grow from it is bad fruit.  Why does every one of us have these incredible cycles of dysfunction brewing in us?  Why do our relationships continually end in the same way?  Why is it so hard to forgive sometimes?  Why do I seem to be fine and then all of the sudden find myself angry and bitter?  It’s because we are slaves to our desires and they control us, they become our gods, our masters.  This is why God is jealous.  Because God no longer becomes the voice of guidance in our lives, our cravings do. 

In this way our desires play out much like an alcoholic’s addiction and the first step to recovery is admitting to having a problem.  But in this case it isn’t a problem, it is a gift that hasn’t been properly developed.  It’s immature.  What do you want?  Is it intimacy, community, family, or to be known.  These things are not bad, they are the things we long for and often times we are too willing to compromise for the inauthentic, incomplete, and distorted satisfactions.  In other words, we are thirsty and we’ll take any drink to make the wanting stop for just a moment.  But as we all know this is only temporary and the hunger comes back even stronger. 

This is exactly what God is asking you to lament, mourn and weep.  Don’t be ashamed of your desire, but die to it.  Trust that God will give the desires of your heart and choose discipline over consumption, struggle over relief, suffering over settling.  It is in this heavy place of humility that you will discover the depth and profundity of God’s gift, that our desire is not a burden but instead a vehicle for saving the world.  And God’s satisfaction is promised to be eternal!

In conclusion, be honest about what you really want, if you don’t know spend time in solitude listening to yourself or just start talking to someone that’s smarter than you.  Ignore the narratives of cool: immature desires should make you look weak, selfish and needy, but overtime with God’s help your soul will deeply desire something far more profound.  Then, finally, ask yourself, “What am I compromising to get what I want? Where am I choosing a narrative of consumerism and self-gratifying love over a narrative of reconciliation and self-sacrificial love?”  It is in this space your faith will truly be challenged, but there is life, redemption and hope on the other end…or so I’m told.  Shalom.

I Would Like To Argue I'm Not That Hard on Myself

Today’s Old Testament reading in the daily office struck a difficult note.  It was a reading from the book of Lamentations and it essentially described the deep longing God’s people had to return home, but at the same time understanding that it was their sins that brought them there.  Often times people will argue with me and tell me that I am too hard on myself.  When I make a mistake, more specifically, when I knowingly fall into a destructive pattern of behavior, hurt others, and/or stunt my spiritual growth, I tend to speak hyperbolically about how I have upset the cosmos.  The response from my friends is generally, “what about grace?”

Here’s my thought about grace: if you read most liturgies for confession or reconciliation, they generally follow along the lines of, “I was lost but now I am found.”  My point is, yes, you were can come back to the community whether it be in an existential way or a physical one (say your actions got you excommunicated), but what does it mean to be lost.  I guess “lost-ness” for me means that for a few days before I repented for my sins I was depressed and felt bad.  So this is what I get for betraying a covenant? 

This is where I struggle with books like Lamentation, the middle parts of Isaiah, and other parts of prophetic literature: the price for betrayal is exile, real exile, where your teeth gnash, and you wail for forty years and your children eat nothing but gruel.  So those people’s sins, their betrayals and their deviances got them generations in exile and all I have to deal with is guilt?  That doesn’t sound like justice to me.  Furthermore, I wonder if we are even worshipping the same God.  There has to be more to lost-ness than just feeling bad.  I would say this especially because there are plenty of things I do that are probably considered sinful or betraying God that I don’t necessarily feel bad about.

My pondering is essentially, what have I lost?  What great dream did God have for me that I have lost because of my shortcomings?  Am I alone today, still dealing with feelings of rejection and isolation because of the sins of my past?  These are simply just questions and the answers to them are unanswerable, however, I do believe they point me to the seriousness of our sins.  Have we lost respect for our God?  Has our narrative of free grace and the freedom to come and go as we please, sent us into an exile that we don’t even know we are in?  The humanist in me would like to argue that the world is getting better, we are becoming more socially conscious and less violent.  But, this can’t possibly be the Promised Land! 

This brings me back to my original point: our sins are serious.  I worship the same God whose people generations ago found themselves in exile because of their betrayals.  I cannot possibly be exempt from that kind of suffering.  I suppose the good news is, I haven’t arrived.  This so-called enlightened place I find myself in isn’t the Promised Land.  There is a better life, a more whole life, a more communal life out there, however, my biggest fear is that my exile will last longer than my years in this body.