"I Shall Not Want": Desire is Good, Actually
second in a guest series by Myles Werntz on Psalm 23 and the moral life
The first statement that the 23rd Psalm drives into us is the largest framework of the moral life—that we live our lives on borrowed time and borrowed soil, led by the God who is bound up in time with us. God is not the cosmic tyrant, but the shepherd, the Holy One in the tent in the desert, the crucified Lord lying dead.
This frame, that the LORD is the one intimate to us, both creates real hope and terror at once: the Holy Spirit is not some force to be wielded, but the LORD of creation. The temptation is what Alan Jacobs has described as “the speed of God”—being a creature involves resisting the Promethean speed and the temptation to lift off from what it means to be a dying creature.
It is right and good for us to confess that we are creatures, but in this discussion, there are creatures and then there are creatures.
There’s a way of talking about ourselves as creatures as “messy” or “limited” which is, I think, a way of closing ourselves off from both aspiration and pain: by lowering our sights, we don’t have to jump too high, try too much, or—most importantly—be changed by God. Our self-appellation as “fallen” or “all too human” misses the mark here, conflating being a creature who desires too much with a creature who desires, a creature who has insatiable appetites with one who has appetites.
To be a creature is to be in motion, not immutable, not static. We age, hunger, decay, and dream, able to remember good days behind us, and dread the ones in front of us. Nearly a millenium ago, Thomas Aquinas helped named the difference between creation and God as the difference between essence and existence: essence just simply is, without potential and without change, where existence is always in flux. Anything in existence, because it is thrown into time and space—because it does not begin on its own resources—is dependent, caused, and needy. It is my tomato plants in need of rain, humans in need of love, stars in need of helium to burn.
And it is, from one angle, the part of being human that we’re most embarrassed by, or most confounded by: that we are never satisfied, but always desiring beings. Our desire for God is unquenched; our desire for love is unsatiated. We are not those whose desires do not change: infants desire differently and different things than adults. And it is in that hunger that the great unease of the Christian moral life appears. Desire—desire for existence and all that sustains it, both materially and immaterially—is part of the deal. There is no space in being a human moral creature that lies outside that matrix, if we are those who are characterized by existence. And yet, not all that is desired is good on the face, either in the way we desire it or in the measure.
To say that we do in fact desire is the first step to being able to confess, with the Psalmist, that in the presence of the LORD, we will approach not-wanting. But denying wanting, putting aside desire itself, one of the core features of being alive in the world, is no good, for that is what we are as creatures: wanting, desiring beings, unable to sustain ourselves except by that which comes from outside ourselves.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his lectures on Genesis, describes the tree at the center of the garden in this way, a sign of the thing which sustains our lives which is both among us, and yet not generated by us. We are, he says, those whose lives are meant to be eccentric, always reaching out, because that it is what our created existence is: a constant reaching out, for God, the One who has created and sustains us.
The banishing of desire, of need, from the moral life, has led in many cases to thinking in only one way, namely, command: we should do what is good because it has been asked of us, full stop. We are unworthy servants, unfit for the crumbs from the table, and doing what is good because it sustains us—much less gives us pleasure—is to ruin the act. We do what has been commanded of us, irrespective of desire, need, or want, and find our happiness not in satisfaction of desire but of having been granted survival. But this is to confuse the way of the Psalm with the way of Kant: with the Psalmist, need and desire are put front and center in terms of the relation between the LORD and creation. We are created as desiring-beings, and it is no shame of ours that we mix the desire for God with the desire to be pleased by God’s presence.
How did we come so far from this vision of desire as not intrinsic to being human, but as good? There are many cuprits, to be sure, but the chief of these is a vision of the human as self-sustained if not self-mastered. As Augustine reminded us over and over again, the Christian life is one of desire, of knowing the world as a series of unfufilled longings not for some other world, but of God, the heart of the world.1 As the deer thirsts for water, the Psalmist writes, so we thirst for God; like sheep, we desire, hunger, and seek that which is only proper to being alive.
Desire, then, is not a bad thing, and not something to be apologized for. Apart from desire, we would want nothing, not even good things, not even God. There is no way out of desire, and no need to apologize for it, for desire is the language of motion, and the difference between dragged around by our noses and hearing the call of Lady Wisdom. For the psalmist to say that they do not want is not to say that desire is eternally extinguished, for absent desire, we remain still and motionless, unmoved even by God. For the psalmist to say that they do not want is to say that, the shepherd-LORD is the face and shape of good desiring, satisfied perpetually.
But while desire is constitutive of the structure of what it means to be a human, it is not everything. We intend things, but not all that we intend should be seen through to completion; we move from day to day by answering the call of good desires (of the body and soul) and refusing the desires that are all-consuming, confusing satiation with the thing itself: lust, idolatry, greed.
And it is in this environment that vice appears: not as an intruder, but as a diminished friend. Lust piggybacks off of sexual desire; idolatry shuffles in under worship’s shadow; greed hides in the luggage of provision. In the all-inclusive resort, we find this simulacrum, a surreal environments, operating “above the real”, in which every whim for food or drink could be met. And in this, the paradox appears: in a place of pure provision, someone still does the dishes, not every desire can be met, the laws of Quintana Roo are still in force. Even the menus were promissory notes, awaiting daily shipments of fruit, menu items, and wait staffs. The desire economy of the all-inclusive does a fairly good job of hiding most of these nuts and bolts, creating the illusion of an endless supply, but the fact that each restaurant has a menu breaks the spell. Limits to desire, either by necessity or by desire’s true design, appear as either those things which we will be broken by or which will break us.
What we seek—particularly when we seek that which is just—only comes to us through desire, such that desire is not the villain but how good things enter in. The trick is that these desires ultimately only find their proper shape in the kingdom come, where the valleys are filled in and the mountains razed, one in which we learn that desires met involves being fed and feeding, eating and washing dishes, serving that we may be served.
In this desire for satisfaction, then, we are invited into either a bottomless pit or endless rest. Both lust and love teach us this: a desire, one satisfied once, wants to be satisfied again. Our desire, shaped by that given by the Shepherd-LORD, takes us, we will find, into green grasses, a flowing stream, a banquet, all in the company of both the LORD and our enemies. For unless our desire encompasses those who we would keep out of the feast, our desire is not yet complete. It is not without reason that the context of this picture of desiring—the stream—is one which is always running, dry and more flush, but always running.