Shadows between Desire and Love
Ash Wednesday, 13th February, 2002
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
There is a region of shadows between desire and love. Desire can certainly
exist without the commitment of loving; and something can also be present
beyond desire, that nevertheless fails to reach the fulfilment or mature
state we call love. (St Augustine, Confessions)
Augustine here makes some observations about human relationships. But what
he observed about human relationships is not limited to those relationships
alone; intermediate, unfulfilled states of being can be present in our
relationship with God. Augustine referred to this fact when he spoke of how,
when we choose not to allow ourselves to respond as much as we are able to
the vision of our humanity in its fullness that God intended for us, we are
in nothing less than a kind of shadowland; a pale third-rate level of what
we might otherwise be.
Just as we can know in ourselves various stirrings of desire for a genuine
sharing and communion with one another, so we also know in ourselves stirrings
of desire for God, for His goodness, beauty and love. Catholic theologians
have always affirmed that a desire for God is both a natural instinct and a
need which has characterised humanity from the beginning, and it has likewise
affirmed that the fulfilment of this instinct for God is a natural one –
something that we repress, deny or manipulate for our own ends only at risk
to our real growth. If we desire God, but go no further, then we remain
somewhere in that shadow land.
In this Lenten season, we are asked to hear again God's call to us to
return, and to keep on returning, over and over again. The various disciplines
we undertake are a response to that insistent call. If we undertake them for
any lesser reason, let alone as a mere seasonal ritual, they will have only
a superficial effect. They are ways of helping us to move out of that
shadowland, to help the outline of our desire for God turn into something
with some real substance and solidity, as it is transformed into the
fulfilling commitment of love.
But we also have to be careful of what moves our discipline. Last Sunday
I referred to the radical teaching of Jesus about fasting which has precedents
in the Old Testament: a radical tradition that saw fasting, not in terms of
self mortification and denial, but as a deep searching to get things right,
and in order, in a positive way.
A discipline that involves us going without, in order to seek something
bigger than our own good and pleasure, can be a good thing. It is one thing
to choose something that takes shape because we want to offer more to God and
others, but there can be basically unhealthy motives for self denial. We may
try to cover a sense of worthlessness by acquiring things, or pretend that
something we are unhappy with in ourselves simply isn't there, and then feel
that we need to punish the part of ourselves that we are dissatisfied with,
or to punish our self indulgences. Inflicting discomfort on some part of
ourselves because we dislike or reject that part will not remove or transform
it; in fact, such behaviour is more likely to strengthen our sense of
dissatisfaction. Discipline undertaken as self punishment can come close to
the very opposite of accepting love, and drive us further back into that
shadowland.
Only the acceptance of unconditional love – whether through a human
channel or, more directly, in a sense of God's acceptance of us despite the
reality of our failings – can offer a healing gift that will transform
that kind of situation within. At this point, we see how Jesus' insistence on
understanding fasting, not as a mortifying discipline, but as an examination
of our basic motivations, and as a check on the bigger picture of which it is
a part, is one of many signs of his perceptiveness when it comes to human
motivation.
To develop our half formed desire for God into something substantial and
mature: St Augustine was firmly on track when he described this as a way of
understanding what we are on about, a purpose of which we need to be reminded
from time to time. I want to close with another quote from St Augustine, in
which he addressed the same subject, but looked at it from a different angle
– not from ours, but from God's. He wrote of God's call to Him in a way
that we might think of as His call to us this Lent:
I discovered that I was a long way from You in a land of unlikeness. And it
was as if I heard a voice from above saying, 'I am the food of the fully grown:
grow and you will feed on me. But you will not change me into you as you do
your ordinary food. Rather, you will be changed into me.' And I recognised that
you had corrected man for his iniquity and made my spirit vanish away like a
spider's web. And I said, 'Is truth, then, nothing at all, since it is not
spread out in space finite or infinite?' And Your voice called from afar, 'Yes,
I am He who is'. I heard as one hears in one's heart, and there was no further
room for doubt. I could more easily have doubted that I myself was alive than
believe the Truth not to be, which is known to be by the things He made. I am
filled with awe and ardour: I am overawed in the measure that I am unlike Him;
I glow with fire in the measure that I am like Him.
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