What comes to your mind when you think about the word desire? Is desire a familiar friend to you? Or something that you run from as soon as you feel even a hint of it? We all carry different desires in our lives: desire for food, desire for another person, desire for a promotion at work, desire for a house (or a bigger house, or more stuff for your house). Or perhaps your desire is more abstract: desire for more peace and calm in your life, desire to be loved, desire to achieve a mission or purpose in life.
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines the verb desire as “to long or hope for;” “to express a wish for” or “to feel the loss of.” Notice how desire is so closely tied to disappointment or anticipation: we’re looking forward to something, but we haven’t yet attained it. Or on the flip side, the final definition intertwines desire with loss or grief, as when we desire something we once had but lost.
What are some of the desires you identify most strongly in your life?
A short time before the movie release a few years ago, I read the children’s book The Giver by Lois Lowry. In this novel, the characters live in a dystopian future where everything exists in shades of gray. The lack of visible color extends as a metaphor to the citizens’ emotions and longings. The inhabitants of this community take a pill each day that suppresses desire and emotion. The plot of the book begins when the main character, Jonas, is assigned to the role of Receiver of Memory. This assignment requires him to receive all the painful memories that the society has wiped from its memory.
I listened to a podcast discussing some of these themes in greater detail after reading the book. This theme discussed in the podcast struck me: because the characters in the book do not experience emotion and have no memories, they don’t experience feelings of pain.
Wouldn’t we all like that? Our world is full of pain: we have only to open up a newspaper, turn on the TV, or take a walk on the city streets to see suffering in our world. We grieve the deaths of those we love, we feel pain at broken relationships, we are shocked by the violence around the world, and we weep at images of children who are starving.
As Jonas begins his process of receiving the memories the society chose to erase, he is wrecked by the intensity of the emotions he feels, ranging from joy to sadness. In the process, something starts to change in him. He begins to see in color. He stops taking his pills and begins to experience desire, sadness, and joy in his daily life. Emotions he didn’t even know existed are now rising to the surface.
Another theme that surprised me in this novel was the assertion that medicating pain through erasing memories doesn't just strip these people of suffering. Because pain and longing do not exist, there is no opportunity for joy.
There are a multitude of ways that I attempt to make myself happy to feel a fragment of that joy in my day-to-day life. I’ll obsess over how many Facebook likes I get on that photo, spend hours playing mindless games on my phone when work feels overwhelming, or stop and get my favorite fast food when I’ve had a bad day. But it doesn’t take long for me to realize that these are all ways I’m simply medicating my pain and deadening my feelings through this false sense of happiness, while denying the deeper desire that bubbles just beneath the surface.
We all have ways that we choose to escape from our pain and longings. These typically involve us numbing that pain or desire, driving it far away so we don't have to deal with it or feel it. We can run to shopping, drugs or alcohol, sex, the approval of others, perfection, power…any number of things that quiet the voices inside of us that want something more.
How do you avoid pain and deaden your heart to your desires?
Pain is uncomfortable, that's true. Longing typically leads to pain, because our longings likely won’t be perfectly fulfilled in this life. But if I kill my desire and shove my pain into a deep dark corner of my heart where it will never be acknowledged, my life will be flat. Maybe I won’t feel sadness or longing, but I also am robbed of my ability to experience joy.
I love that joy and pain are juxtaposed so clearly together. They are two strong and seemingly opposing emotions, but you have to be able to experience one to find another. As a Christian, I am grateful for the pain God has brought me through, because the deeply rooted joy I can now experience is so clearly an outflow of that. I can rejoice and be thankful in God.
How can you choose to acknowledge your desire, knowing that it will be painful?
I need to choose to embrace desire every day. (And to be honest, I’m not always successful.) It is easy to find ways to medicate pain in our world, because we as a people don’t like to feel these difficult emotions. But I must choose to sit in pain or sadness when I feel it, rather than running away from it. I must choose to become alive to my desires, although that often hurts. And in so doing, I’m opening myself up to experiencing joy and compassion toward others.