Saturday, January 16, 2010

Acquainted with Our True Desires?

"Well, I'm scufflin' and I'm shufflin' and I'm walkin' on briars/I'm not even acquainted with my own desires" (Bob Dylan, Bye and Bye, 2001)

These words, I think, reflect the experiences of so many people today. We labor under such a load of cultural accretions that we're unacquainted with our own true desires.

With the glut of options we have today for how to spend our lives and a whole industry--advertising--more than happy to establish normative desires for us, not to mention our natural predisposition for denying our need for what other mortals need, we're insulated from what we truly crave: relationship with God and with others.

So, we keep searching for the next thing to scratch our itches. (U2 sang about this some years ago.)

The first thing the Church must do in this generation is reacquaint people with their own real desires, not the ones a befuddled world says we should have. We must go down in the gut and show people how much they want and need relationship with the One Who made them and then, to restore relationship, died and rose for them. And we must show how much we want to be pulled out of our selfish isolation, into relationship with one another. The God of love in Christ "satisfies our longing, like nothing else will do."

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