There is no desire which is not first a desire given to us.

Editorial by Rev. Peter John Cameron, O.P.

The main character in Saul Bellow’s 1958 novel Henderson the Rain King has a problem: 

There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger. It only said one thing, I want, I want! And I would ask, “What do you want?” But this was all it would ever tell me. It never said a thing except I want, I want, I want! At times I would treat it like an ailing child whom you offer rhymes or candy. I would walk it, I would trot it. I would sing to it or read to it. No use… Through fights and drunkenness and labor it went right on, in the country, in the city. No purchase, no matter how expensive, would lessen it. Then I would say, “Come on, tell me. What’s the complaint?”… The demand came louder, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want! And I would cry, begging at last, “Oh, tell me then. Tell me what you want!” 

What is the meaning of this desire that will not leave him alone? 

Synthetic bells, real grace 

Not long ago there was a fascinating article on the Internet written by a well-educated, young journalist who had grown up in a devout Catholic family, but who “gave up religion” around the time she went to college. She moved from the South to New York City, which she dubbed “an ideal haven for the newly godless” because of the patent lack of religion in the majority of the young people she met. But she kept running into religious people in the most unlikely places and, she wrote, “I envied all of them their devotions.” 
After two years of letting “faith slip my mind,” the young woman woke up one spring day “at exactly noon” to the sound of recorded bells from a nearby church. Those bells were like Henderson’s nagging, afternoon voice of desire. The journalist recounts: 

The synthetic bells in Brooklyn transported me back not just to the many… Masses I attended in [the school chapel] but the times in high school when I used to steal down there alone at lunchtimes and kneel in my uniform and take solace in the sense that Something was watching over me. 

No matter how much faith may have slipped her mind, the disturbance known as desire continued to break through her heart. 

Summoned out of ourselves 

“Desire,” says C.S. Lewis, “summons you out of yourself.” As Henderson knew all too well, we do not give ourselves our desires. Neither can we satisfy them… or appease them… or, for that matter, remove them. Life without desire would lead to depression. 

Our desires are the one thing about us that is infinite. That is why “no purchase, no matter how expensive” could fulfill them. Henderson senses that somehow the very meaning of his life is contained in his persistent desires; that is why he cries, begging, “Tell me what you want!” Henderson intuits that his desires are taking him somewhere… that they are opening him up to an exciting plan bigger than himself… enticing him to go after it. To understand the meaning of our desires, we must be open to the Infinite. 

Once the journalist left off practicing her faith, it became difficult to “resist feeling all kinds of empty that we can’t name and can’t begin to fill and which has given rise to whole new myths.” Thank God for that dissatisfaction which moved her to a new awareness: 

The sudden surfacing of the memory, the heady safety of belief and of someone knowing where I was going and that it was right, made my life since relinquishing it to reason feel like a wasteland in comparison, a frolic in the land of false idols. 

Our desires are given to us to lead us to the One who gave them to us. They are given so that we can share in the happiness of the One who created us. They are given so that we can know who God is and how much he alone can fulfill our lives. 

Even in her lapsed state, the journalist confesses:

There is the temptation to play along once more, to take shelter in the words that… good, intelligent people have believed for two thousand years are the right words. It is hard, too, to resist the gestures… Sometimes even in New York, when I’m at my wit’s end, I find myself sending up a plea for help. And afterwards, in the face of all reason, I sometimes feel relief. 

Rev. Peter John Cameron, O.P.
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