The Stoic and Mystic Attitudes Toward Desire
November 7, 2023
Hi! How is each and every one? That was indeed, a long holiday but still
interrupted week, wasn’t it? Sure we managed to keep our loved ones in mind,
prayer and offerings and we plan to carry on until the end of the month in
loving memory of our beloved family members, relatives and friends. May you and
I also remember to be united to the person and intentions of the Holy Father
and to pray for him always. I thought it good to continue doing so as the good
God is always around, by our side, taking care of each and every one.
I am sure you
are as excited as I am to know more about the other attitudes toward
desire. Let’s continue considering the
other two attitudes toward desire (From
Broken Gods, Hope, Healing, and the
Seven Longings of the Human Heart, Gregory K. Popcak, Ph. D. Ch 2). Hopefully you and I discover our
personal attitude and work on whatever is a better attitude toward the desires
of the human heart.
The
Stoic
By contrast, stoics live in fear and/or
denial of their desires. Whether they
have been burned by their own passions or damaged by someone else’s attempt to
use them as an object of desire, stoics try to deny that they have any real
desires, and as a consequence they tend to become bitter and angry. They are the “querulous and disillusioned
pessimists, [the] ‘sourpusses’” that Pope Francis decried in Evangelium Gaudii [The Joy of the
Gospel] (2023).
Each of us can name times when we
weren’t truthful about our needs, or when our attempts to repress our desires
made us resentful. But when this stance
becomes a way of life, stoicism can be the source of tremendous pain. Stoics often suffer from what psychologists
call internal sacred conflicts (Pargament, 2011). In other words, when two spiritual goods
appear to clash (for instance, the desire for intimacy vs. the desire for
freedom, or the desire for sexual fulfillment vs. the desire to be faithful),
stoics will try to repress or even destroy the desire they consider more
troublesome instead of learning to fulfill both desires in a healthy way. Unfortunately, repressed desires always fight
back with a vengeance. The more stoical
we are about our desires, the more likely it is that we will condemn ourselves
to a perpetual cycle of repressive denial followed by secret self-indulgence,
leading, ultimately, to disintegration of the self.
Question for reflection: When are you more likely to play the stoic in
the face of your desires?
Neither the addict’s nor the stoic’s
attitude toward desire is consistent with the call to become gods through God’s
grace. Divinization is about both the
ultimate integration of the person and the total restoration of our
relationship with God, but the postures the addict and stoic adopt toward
desire lead to dis-integration of the person and alienation from an authentic
experience of God. Fortunately, there is a third way, the way of the mystic.
The
Mystic
Most people think of a mystic as someone
who sits on a mountaintop, cut off from humanity and devoting all of his time
to thinking deep thoughts. In truth, every
Christian is called to be a mystic. In
the Christian tradition, a mystic is simply someone who experiences God behind
and within each moment, who sees that God is reaching out to us through even
the most mundane and even the most profane human experiences. The mystic sees his or her desires as a door
to heaven and understands that by connecting with the deeper realities to which
our desires point, we can find true fulfillment.
“I love food,” Aaron says. “I enjoy
trying new things, going to new restaurants, cooking new recipes, but I never
really thought of it as anything more than that, until this past year when I
had kind of an epiphany.
“Enjoying eating as I do, I always saw
fasting as this punitive thing. But this
past Lent, I was sitting in my car after Mass, just sort of lost in
thought. As I sat there, I just had this
question come to mind, ‘What are you hungry for?’ At first, my mind started wandering to the
places I like to go for brunch after Mass with my friends, but I just felt like
God was nudging me to go a little deeper.
I just kept hearing, ‘What are you hungry for?’ and I thought, ‘You,
Lord. I’m hungry for you. Fill me up.’
I just sat there like that for…I don’t know, a few seconds, maybe a
minute. It wasn’t a long time, but it
felt eternal or something. I remember
tearing up. I wasn’t sad. I just felt…open. I can’t say I’ve ever really felt anything
quite like it before. The more I
reflected on that time, I realized that this was the whole point of
fasting. It wasn’t that food was bad, or
God was saying that I should probably lose a few, or that good meals were
somehow sinful. Fasting was an
opportunity to remind myself of my hunger for God. That, as much as I enjoy my favorite brunch
place, the only thing that can really satisfy my deepest hungers is God. I haven’t been quite the same since. Strangely, I think I enjoy food even more
now. I still love going out to eat and
trying new recipes, but eating has taken on a whole new dimension for me. It’s not just pleasurable, it has become more
spiritual. Does that make sense? I open a menu and remember that God wants to,
like the Psalm says, ‘spread a table before me,’ a table of all of his
blessings and grace, and I just feel this urge to take a quiet moment to thank
God for his blessings and tell him that I love him. And in those times when I’m fasting or
dieting (because, you know, I love to eat), the hunger I feel isn’t just
something to suffer through. It reminds
me that as much as God wants to satisfy all my longings and desires, the thing
he most wants to give is himself. I just
have to open my heart to ask him to ‘fill me up.’ Eating, not eating, it all
just seems more satisfying. It all just
means…more.”
Aaron hasn’t been the same since his encounter with God in his car after Mass because none of us is quite the same when we are falling in love. I began this section on desire by sharing how falling in love with my wife made me want to make everything about her. Falling in love with God involves a similar process. God doesn’t want to take away our desires for lesser things; he just wants to show us how to satisfy those desires in truly fulfilling ways, and he wants to remind us that the thing we were made to desire most is him.
In 1928,
St. Josemaria Escriva was a young priest in Spain who since seminary had
developed a reputation for special graces and holiness. However, as Fr. Peter
explains, he was not a mystic or visionary, a missionary, or a founder of a
religious order, like St. John Bosco, SS. Jacinta and Francisco, St. Teresa of
Avila, or Mother Theresa.
Yet, God chose to show St.
Josemaria a specific pathway through which he wanted to be in the world in a
way that he had never been there before. It was a reiteration of what Our Lord
did with his disciples when he ascended into Heaven. God didn’t show St.
Josemaria a specific institution or organization; he showed him how all the
faithful, especially the laity, are called to change the world and bring Christ
to the middle of the world through their work and ordinary lives.
From that moment on October
2, 1928, when St. Josemaria saw Opus Dei, the Work of God/Work of God, he
dedicated his life to spreading the message and to teaching the path to
holiness and finding God in the world, to being contemplatives in the world and
meditating on the Gospel, and to leading holy lives that truly change the
world.
This is it! An ordinary
life made meaningful, intimate and virtuous by seeing, loving and serving God,
the others, through work which is service.
See you in
the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may
you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care;
‘til He brings us together again.”
It must be
providential that I came across the news item of 4 weeks ago about Marie
Osmond’s demise triggered by an allergic attack from shrimp she has eaten. The words by which I always end a post are
hers and her brother’s, Donnie from their variety show on television “Donnie
and Marie”. They always end their show
singing those words. Please join me in a
moment of prayer for her soul, “Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let
your light shine on her forever. May she rest in peace. Amen.”
Affectionately,
Guadalupinky
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