Our desires point to something deeper and more transcendent than we often notice. When we read them correctly, they point us to God. In this post, I’ll talk about the two different senses of “deep” to get a handle on our deep desires. I’ll get around to making sense of the heart’s desire for God in part II.
In the great film musical The Greatest Showman (2017) starring Hugh Jackman, the opening and closing song have these lyrics:
“Ladies and gents, this is the moment you’ve waited for, Been searching in the dark, your sweat soakin’ through the floor, And buried in your bones there’s an ache that you can’t ignore. […] It’s everything you ever want, It’s everything you ever need, And it’s here right in front of you, This is where you wanna be.” (“The Greatest Show” in The Greatest Showman)
It’s a fabulous song and others have done great renditions of this song too (see my favorite here.)
The song is catchy and well-produced but it also comments on a deeper reality in the human heart. The song comments on the human hearts’ waiting, longing, even aching for something that is difficult to put into words. The movie offers the performance/show as the satisfaction to that ache. This song highlights something that is so common to the human experience that we often miss it. In this post, I want to talk about how our desires shape us, how there are better and worse desires, and ultimately in another post, how they point to God.
Desires for God?
Few things could be more important than figuring out our desires. We act and lead our life out of what we desire, our desires shape us and mold our identity and create a framework for how we see ourselves and how we see the world. We all recognize desires in us that lead us to a life we want, desires that do not, and maybe we even wish we had some desires that we lack. Desires are important.
In a previous post I talked about the various levels of our desires. I mentioned that we are most of the time on autopilot and we do not go beneath the surface to discover our deepest desires nor do we do the vital work of asking what is worth desiring. Christianity claims that at the deepest of levels, the desire of every human being is God. That no matter if one stays at the auto pilot level or plunges the depths of their heart, that their greatest desire is God. To most of us, this sounds ridiculous. In this post I want to lay some ground work to eventually explain how this claim makes sense.
We do not often think about our deepest desires and when we do, we do not find a love of God there! When I present such a claim to my students, I routinely get blank stares mixed with “to be happy” “to love and be loved” and “to be successful.” No one answers “unity with God” in my classroom nor in the wider culture. That’s the data. It seems absurd to claim that all desire God. But this is not the whole story.
Desires and Identity
At work here is first a normative notion of “deep”. “Deep” does not just mean “at the base level” but, “the most important.” At issue here is a desire for God that is somehow implicit in other, seemingly non-God desires, and that God is the most worthy object of these desires and fulfills them better than their seeming objects.
Desires shape us and deep desires shape us deeply. I have a deep desire to be a faithful husband and present father. I also have a desire to travel to Europe. Both of these are good desires but because my family desires are deeper than my travel ones, they shape me and my actions more.
Shallow versus Deep Desires
But deep desires are not only those we are most committed to. Our deep desires also have another quality of what we think we ought to pursue. This feature of depth is in contrast to shallowness. So consider two different desires, one shallow and one deep.
Shallow: I desire friends with those who can benefit me most in my career.
Deep: I desire friends with those I enjoy their company and those I can love and be loved by.
Shallow: I exercise solely for physical appearance.
Deep: I exercise to build mental and physical discipline, enhance well-being, and improve physical appearance.
Surely we see the difference between these two. One is deep in the normative sense, that is, we ought to have it. It is how our desires should be. Notice that even if I did have these desires as core commitments—deep in the first sense—they would not be deep in this second sense. Arguably both senses of depth are important but we often do not talk about this second sense of normative importance.
Shallow and Deep Desires
And if we do in fact come to the realization that our deeply held desires are shallow, the realization is disorienting. David McPherson explains it this way in his paper on our deep desires,
“If we come to think that the things, persons, or projects we care deeply about don’t really matter, i.e. they don’t stand independent of our desires as that with which we ought to be concerned, then this can have a deflationary effect on our caring and it can induce a kind of identity crisis or existential vertigo.” (McPherson Paper: 394)
We have a sense that our deep desires are deep in the first sense (held tightly) and should be deep in the second sense (those things we ought to hold).
Worthy Desires
We cannot live with the fact that our deep desires that structure our identity and guide our whole life vision are accidental and make no claim on us. To think that our deepest commitments and desires for what to become in this world, what to pursue and avoid, deflate into whatever sort of a whims our history and biology give us seems to not hold water. We look at the prior desires and achievements and want to tell our younger selves, “something else matters more! Don’t miss it.”
Our desires, even our deepest ones, can be worthy or unworthy of a good life.
I have discussed the feature of those desires but not the content of those desires. In the next post I will argue that it is a desire for God that we have as our deepest desires in both senses.
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