The Abyss of Desire

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

For the morning prayer of Monday, the Church recites Psalm 41(42), which begins with the famous line of our soul’s yearning for God, as the deer yearns for running streams.

This psalm is one of my favourites because of the weight that it gives to - at least on the face of it - the subjective dimension of faith. It gives heed to what I, the one at prayer, am experiencing. Moreover, it gives heed to the fact that I wrestle with the faith, not so much as a deposit of ideas, but as the relationship with God that the ideas are supposed to point to.

As I mentioned in my address to the seminarians of Vianney College, many Christians dismiss the subjective dimension of faith - including experience and desires - as something that is fickle and unreliable. By contrast, many would deem the firm objectivity of the deposit of ideas as the surer foundation of faith.

In response, the president of Communion and Liberation, Julian Carron, explores this in the first couple of chapters of a new publication, The Radiance in Your Eyes: What Saves Us from Nothingness. What is fascinating is the way Carron equates the full use of reason to “being faithful to what emerges in experience” (24).

He quotes Luigi Giussani to say that experience is an important point of reference for the life of faith because the heart of one’s experience is “the continual reference to desire” (22). Desire here goes beyond the fleeting feelings or passions that change from one thing to another. Carron here alerts us to Augustine’s Exposition of Psalm 42. In it Augustine speaks of desire, not as a shallow feeling, but as a bottomless abyss that cries out and awaits a response from the bottomless abundance of God. To quote Augustine:

If by abyss we understand a great depth, is not man’s heart, do you not suppose, an abyss? For what is there more profound than that abyss? Men may speak, may be seen by the operations of their members, may be heard speaking in conversation: but whose thought is penetrated, whose heart is seen into? What he is inwardly engaged on, what he is inwardly capable of what he is inwardly doing or what purposing, what he is inwardly wishing to happen, or not to happen, who shall comprehend? I think an abyss may not unreasonably be understood of man, of whom it is said elsewhere, ‘Man shall come to a deep heart, and God shall be exalted’.

This last point is pertinent for our purposes here. The deep well of the heart is precisely where God shall be exalted. We can cite a couple of reasons for this. The first reason, identified by Thomas Aquinas, is that recognising the depths of our desire is the first step to recognising that we are incapable of filling that abyss. Only God can do that, and our recognition of that, Thomas says, is a step towards adopting a posture of praise of the Lord. The second, more constructive reason, is that the deep well of desire speaks of the infinite dimension of the human person, which images the infinity of the divine Creator.

To return to the psalms, this is why the deep can call unto the deep (42:7). Our yearning and our desire, understood as the infinite abyss, is the locus where we have the opportunity to recognise the infinity of God, who put such a desire into each and every heart.

Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.