There is a word we use every single day without even noticing, and it tells us more about ourselves than we suspect. Desire. When we walk into a shop and the assistant asks, "What would you like?", behind the polite formula lies an enormous question - perhaps the oldest one that can be put to a human being. Because we do not desire only at the till: we desire constantly. While eating, reading, loving, working, praying. Even while sleeping. It has been said, not without reason, that desire is the very essence of the human person.
And yet, of this essence, we speak little and badly. The culture we are steeped in has every interest in keeping us from understanding what a desire really is, because it systematically muddles it with something else: need. The difference is crucial. Need is biological; it shuts us inside the present and inside ourselves: I'm hungry, I eat; I'm thirsty, I drink. Desire, on the other hand, is a psychological and spiritual movement that gathers up the past and the present in order to throw us forward - towards the future and towards the other. Need is satisfied and falls silent; desire, even when it finds what it was looking for, goes on speaking. Consumerism thrives precisely on having flattened one onto the other: it promises to soothe a desire by selling us the answer to a need, and the moment we discover that what we bought wasn't enough, it offers us another. The more desires advertising can light up, the more money changes hands. We end up consuming things we don't even want, but which we've been persuaded we need. To find a way out of this deception it is worth going back to the beginning - and here things become interesting, because desire springs from two opposite places that coexist within us.
The first place is wonder. In front of a smiling face, a landscape, a truth quietly revealing itself, something in us is lifted. Nothing is missing: on the contrary, there is a too much, a promise, an invitation to rise to the height of what is coming towards us. A father's smile over his newborn works like this: it does not fill a gap, it confirms that being is good. In this sense desire is elevation, epi-thymía, an upward surge.
The second place is lack. The word itself says so: de-siderium carries the stars within it, sidera, and evokes someone gazing at the night sky and feeling the absence of what shines far away. There is a Chinese ideogram that draws a man lying on the ground staring up at the waxing moon: desire as the search for what one does not possess. Hebrew is even more blunt: a single word, nefesh, means throat, mouth, stomach, breath, thirst, hunger, and longing all at once. When God breathes life into the nostrils of man, according to Genesis, He makes of him a nefesh hayah: literally, a living desire.
These two origins are not alternatives: they are the two foci of an ellipse. Desire lives in the distance between them. It is a tension, not a point. And this is where everything is at stake.
Because the temptation of every desire is to close the distance. To grasp. To possess. To turn the gift into a thing, the other into an object, the infinite into something that fits in the fist. Genesis tells precisely this story: the tree at the centre of the garden was desirable, but desirable as a gift. Eating from it was the attempt to shorten the distance, to no longer have to receive. And the moment the distance breaks, the whole field collapses. Desire no longer meets the other: it meets only itself. Fixation, paradoxically, drives the object away. We are left holding a dead idol.
From that collapse comes what each of us knows from experience: fragmentation. We no longer desire one thing: we desire a thousand, contradictory ones, pulling us in opposite directions. The flesh against the spirit, ambition against quiet, the need for bonds against the longing to escape. St Paul put it plainly: you do not do what you would wish to do. The originally unified desire has been ground down into desires, in the plural, each tugging its own way. Faced with this experience, three responses have essentially emerged over the centuries. The first, radical and tidy, belongs to certain strands of Buddhism: extinguish desire, reach the cessation of thirst. The second, infinitely poorer, is that of our own society: ignore spiritual desires, inflame social ones, satisfy biological ones. The third is the Christian way, which is the most uncomfortable because it refuses to choose. It does not extinguish desire, does not let it run riot, does not separate flesh from spirit. It attempts a polar unity: holding the poles together without fusing them and without suppressing them.
What does this mean in practice? It means accepting that desire is not trained by being annihilated, but by taking one's distance from it. The distance, not the content. Letting go of grasping, in order to learn to receive. It also means - and this is the hardest thing to accept - not being afraid of the body. Carnal desire is not the enemy of the desire for God: it is often its very language. The Song of Songs is written in that tongue. The bride calls the bridegroom "the desired one of my desire", and the psalmist can say without embarrassment: my flesh longs for you. When a healthy Christian tradition is doing its work, it does not sever body from soul: it lets the soul once again clothe the body, as it should. But the most surprising point - the reason it is still worth writing about desire today - comes at the end. One might think that the whole purpose of this journey is to come to rest, to arrive, to lay down the staff. It is not so. Those who have truly walked this road testify to the opposite: when desire finds what it was seeking, it does not go out. It expands. Fulfilment is not the funeral of desire; it is its oil. Joy, once full, keeps calling, keeps saying come back, because it has learnt that the other is never wholly possessed, and that precisely in this "never wholly" lies its happiness. This is why desire is like a star. You reach it and it draws away. Not out of cruelty, but out of faithfulness. So that you may keep walking.
p.L.V.
Silere non possum