Desire

I want. I want. I want.

When we think of the word “desire”, often the first thing that comes to our mind is our list. All of us have lots of desires. The whole world’s economies are fueled by desire. Everyone wants a bigger, better, newer, shinier, bike or car or house or plane. And if we don’t desire it now, you can rest assured, advertising departments everywhere are investing their resources in figuring out a way to create that desire inside of you.

Of course, we have more than just material desires. We have emotional desires as well. At our best, we want to be accepted. We want to lead meaningful lives. We want to love and be loved. At our worst, we want to hurt those who have hurt us. We want to make others feel bad so we can feel good. And we want to impress everyone.

That’s the funny thing about our desires, they can be good or they can be bad. Like the cartoon depicting the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, our desires whisper inspiration or destruction in our ear. In the blink of an eye we go from saint to sinner.

This internal struggle of competing desires is familiar territory for all of us. We have all had the experience of pursuing a good desire and having it result in a good outcome. You go out of your way to show kindness to a stranger because you desire to be a kind person. In doing so, you are rewarded internally by a sense of positive accomplishment. Often, you are also rewarded externally by a kind response from the person you help.

Similarly, we have all chased after desires that were not so good. Perhaps you gave in to jealousy or greed because of a negative desire for possession of a person or of material things. In doing so, you wounded someone and most certainly yourself as well.

Many solutions have been offered to this struggle. The Buddhist solution is to seek to eliminate desire altogether. The hedonist argues the best way is to simply jump headfirst into the fray and give oneself to the fulfillment of every possible desire. In doing so, the pleasure will be such that it will drown out every other concern.

The Greek gnostic solution is to separate desires into two camps. One camp, connected to the spirit, was all good. The other, connected to the body, was all bad. Everything to do with the spirit--kindness, love, compassion, generosity, selflessness--should be pursued. And everything to do with the body--sex, appetites--should be denied.

Interestingly enough, there is even an economic solution for this quandry. The capitalist argues that selfish desires can be harnessed and redirected by making material gain dependent upon the service of the other. In doing so, our modern concept of “customer service” is created. The customer is always right because the way to the customer’s money is by filling their desire. Those who do it best get rich. Those who don’t, go bankrupt.

Jesus’ solution to this challenge is to offer a paradox that sounds similar to the Buddhist solution, but goes a step further. He said, “Those who desire true life, must despise their self-focused life.” This strange statement holds the key for us.

Every living thing has desires. This is normal and natural. The problem is our desires are constantly at war with one another. But when you look at something that is dead, we immediately see there are no desires at war. There is, in fact, no desires whatsoever.  

So the very first thing that must happen to us, according to Jesus, is that we must die. Fortunately, this death is not a natural death (although that will happen to all of us at some point), it is instead a spiritual death. What must be put to death inside of us are all of our selfish, self-centered desires. All of the things that take away life anyway, these must be put to death.

But it doesn’t stop there. After the death, there is a resurrection. There is a new spiritual life and a new set of other centered desires that emerge. The great theologian, Apostle Paul, describes it in this way, “For when we died with Christ, we were set free from the power of sin….so use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right.”

These beautiful desires to love rightly, to serve willingly, and to give freely spring out of people that have died to themselves. And these desires, when followed consistently are thereby reinforced and become a benevolent cycle that changes not only the person who is acting beautifully but those around them as well.

In one sense, Jesus is suggesting a wholesale desire transplant for all those who are fed up with living life the same old way. Transplanted organs don’t work very well if the immune system is not suppressed systematically. The immune system will attack the new organ, no matter how needed the new organ is. All of the work done to harvest, transport and insert the new organ is useless if the body will not accept it.

In the same way, all of us need a desire transplant. But no matter how much we need it, if we do not deal with the state of our heart before the transplant, then the transplant will fail. When we come to the point that we are ready to truly die to the old selfish way, then and only then are we ready for the new.

So what do you want?