A matter of desire

BEAUTIFUL thought crossed my mind the other day as I was reading some writings of St. Augustine, that revered Church Father whose works have left a great, if not indelible impact on Christian believers through the centuries and up to now.

            I thought of sharing it, with the warning that, yes, it is indeed theological and therefore requires a theological mind. After all, especially nowadays, we need to understand that we all need to do theology.

            Theology not only has a rightful place in the sun. It actually has to occupy the pride of place in our vast and ever-growing field of knowledge and the sciences. Not that it is going to do away with common sense and the regular operation of our reason.

            The contrary is true. Theology will always be in need of common sense and reason. It always has to relate with our existing sciences and arts, and pace with them. Its distinctive contribution is to put in more substance, give meaning and direction to all of them according to the light of faith that brings things to a supernatural order.

            We need to overcome our fear or bias against theology. Such fear has no basis since, whether we like or not, or whether we affirm or deny it, we actually cannot avoid doing theology.

            We are creatures of belief, even if the object of such belief is just our own selves, or nothing transcendent. But the moment we try to understand, explore and explain our beliefs and apply them to our life, we would already be doing at least some theology. We might as well develop our theology as fully as we can!

            Now back to St. Augustine. He was talking about heaven, the be-all and end-all of Christian life, when he made a very succinct conclusion that: “The entire life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire.”

            He said that since we don’t see heaven now and yet we long for it, we need to keep on desiring it to prepare ourselves for it.  That desire not only has to be maintained. It also has to increase as time passes. The time of our life, the time of waiting to see our ultimate end, God, is a time to cultivate our holy desire to the max.

            His argument for this is beautiful. “Suppose you are going to fill some container and you know you will be given a large amount. Then you set about stretching your container.” It is to make room for the tremendous amount we will receive—God himself.

            The idea of stretching or enlarging the container to receive a tremendous amount that we expect can be translated into not only keeping but also increasing our desire of God whom we expect to come to us in overwhelming abundance. In short, we have to make that desire fervent! We need to constantly feed it to keep it burning

            We can increase our desire of God by growing in the virtues—more humility, more faith and charity, more patience and understanding—in the tenor of what Christ himself said once: “For them do I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in the truth.” (Jn 17,19)

            Imagine…Christ himself, who is already God, feels the need to sanctify himself that we also may be sanctified in the truth!

            Obviously, given our shortcomings and our tendency to be big in desire and intention but small and unstable in performance, we also need to increase our trust in God’s providence, since he knows how to make use even of our defects and failures to fulfill the ultimate design and purpose for us.

            We have to be wary of abandoning this trust especially when we suffer some persistent human misery. Let’s always remember St. Paul’s words: “It’s when I am weak that I am strong,” (2 Cor 12,10) that tell us that  we can use our shortcomings and failures to get even closer to God.

            It should be part of our holy desire for holiness to grow always in our trust in God’s ever-merciful providence. Perhaps a prayer we can use to trigger this holy desire as we start the day every morning could be the following:

            “As this day begins, fill our hearts with a desire to serve you. May our thoughts and our actions give you glory. Purify our hearts from all desire for evil. Let us seek to do your will. Open wide our hearts to the needs of all our brethren. May they not be deprived of our love. Amen.”