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Spirituality and Desire

Reflections offered to St. Mary Parish on Saturday, January 19, 2019

I’m hoping to offer you something today a bit novel, perhaps a way of thinking that you’re not
necessarily used to. It pertains to the idea of spirituality, but it will not necessarily jibe with our
common sense understandings of spirituality. That’s okay! The talk isn’t meant to replace how
you may already think about and through spirituality but to offer some new perspectives, ones
with which you may concretely disagree. Even better, then, for you to be proposed these ideas so
as to test the truth of your own! The understanding of spirituality I will offer you, in fact, is a
very old one, albeit reconditioned for today--it’s a very philosophical understanding of
spirituality, which itself was an inherently spiritual discipline. After all, I ​believe​ it was Irenaeus
who recognized the Greek philosophers as having composed the Other old Testament, and
thought the Christian faith offered us the true philosophy. I couldn’t agree with him more! That
said, I propose to think with you today about the nature of a distinct but genuine form spirituality
from a Catholic perspective and why it might be important for you to consider for your spiritual
life. One that is caught deep within the realm of self-reflection as related to our desires.

In this regard, I begin where the any good classical philosopher does: desire, its nature, and what
it means to human life. I will rely in no small part on the thoughts of a Princeton philosopher
named Harry G. Frankfurt who has first developed these thoughts.1

The world is rife with desire. In fact, you might even say that the world is defined by desire! The
ancient philosopher Aristotle thought so, each and every object filled with a primordial desire to
live and thus moving in according with their natures toward the divine good and prime mover.
So too did the Buddha, who sought a way past the karmic circles of desire, synonymous as it is
with life, altogether, by absconding from it altogether. Nirvana, after all, refers to the idea of
“being extinguished” and thus freed from desire and life, terms which are interchangable.

1
​Most of this section is merely a restatement of Harry G. Frankfurt’s excellent work as found in ​The Importance of
What We Care about​ (Cambridge, 1998:Cambridge University Press). The essays most used include “The Freedom
of the Will and Concept of a Person,” “The Importance of What We Care about,” “Identification and
Wholeheartedness,” and “Necessity and Desire.” Other than some easy citations on first- and second-order desires
from “The Concept of the will,” I have so internalized Frankfurt’s thoughts on these issues that I could not say
where mine begin any longer and his end. Best to read the essays for yourselves. They are excellent.
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Whatever one’s view of the helpfulness of desire, if we begin to pay close attention to ourselves,
we can take note of the fact that desire plays a gargantuan role in the human life, undergirding
the meaning and possibility of all that we do.

In this regard, desire is nothing less wishing for something in such a way that it potentially
motivates one toward action. I say “potentially because, although we are bound to act on desire
of some sort, we are not always bound to all desires. Either way, if we look subtly under the
hoods of our being, we will see that we are, indeed, a pool of desires.

We attend first to what Frankfurt calls first-order desires. These kinds of desires are, what I like
to joke, defined by sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. They’re immediate, generally oriented toward
pleasure, and oftentimes synonymous with our natural desires, if we care to posit the oftentimes
unhelpful distinction between natural and social. (We will but only provisionally.)

First-order desires, however, need not only be natural. For instance, I am a college professor, and
my daughter, 4-years-old, knows this fact. College is something that she hears about often, and
thus there is no question in her mind as to whether she’ll attend college, and this point is true
despite her not even fully understanding what a college is. It’s simply a desire built into her life,
and it seems to be social scientists often times call social capital, which has some helpful
explanatory bases for things like generational poverty.

At any rate, second-order desire pertains not to a direct desire prone to immediate pleasure but to
the desire for a particular desire. You might say this second-order desire grounds the human
capacity for deferred pleasure, for instance, since we can take into consideration the immediate
joy of buy 1200 pizzas or the not-so-fun act of putting that money into a retirement account. A
retirement account presumes the capacity for the person to look at himself and say “this pizza
can wait so that I don’t have to work until I’m 85, should I last that long.” This individual has
desired not to desire ice-cream so much and has instead invested what he has.

Second-order desires begin to ground the truly human. Second’ order desires allow us to choose
between our natural inclinations and how we simply are in the world and who want to be instead.
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Do we want to be obese with a stomach ache (ice-cream) or comfortably retired at the age of,
let’s be honest given the lack of access to social security I’ll have, 70?

The notion of will is thus intimately connected with these notions of desire and their relationship.
A will does not refer to anything particularly abstract; it pertains solely to the desire we enact. A
will is a desire as enacted, and although we can say that we didn’t want to do X, Y, or Z, if we do
it, that’s our will. Thus, a will may operate by way of first-order desires, and such wills are rather
chaotic, thrown to the vicissitudes of the world and self. (I think again of my 4-year-old and
2-year-old, both of whom are attempting to gather their desires and act in the world in
accordance with good-wills rather than immediate desires. Aren’t we all?)

Harry Frankfurt helpfully directs our attention to two forms of drug addicts in these
circumstances: the wanton drug addict and the addict who seeks freedom from the enslaved will.
The wantonly addict has accepted his addiction, if he’s ever thought of it, giving himself fully
over to his first-order desires from the next fix. There is no other desire that overcomes that one,
and this man is enslaved without the possibility of freedom given his attitude toward his
addiction.

The other addict is “benignly self-alienated” as I like to express the phenomenon. She is addicted
to drugs but hates her addiction, wants freedom from it despite not being able to free herself. In
other words, the second-order desires are rightly ordered, but the will has no capacity on its own
to enact them. And while her will is bound, there is hope for freedom as the support of rehab
may be able to give her the capacity she lacks on her own to break the back of the first-order
desires in these circumstances, an entrenched will that can choose nothing else.

With this excursus on the will and its potential freedom or enslavement, we come now to the idea
of care. Care simply builds off of the ideas that we have just defined and understood. Care is
nothing more than a willed desire that we desire at a second-order level for a long period of time.
That is, desires are ephemeral, disappearing as quickly as they arise sometimes. They don’t
matter in themselves as such, and can simply be willy nilly parts of our existing. But those
perduring desires--for instance my love for both my spouse and my children--are perduring
desires. And as perduring, they are more significant, defining me in more dominant and specific
ways.
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In fact, cares are the kinds of desires that give way to what we might call identity. Identity is
often used in this world in the context of “I identify with….” It can ground a politics, a
religiosity, a spirituality. But at its base, identity is nothing more and nothing less than a
particular structure and arrangement as offered to one’s cares. I’ll explain.

I have several cares in my life: my students, the quality of my teaching, that my wife loves me,
that I love my wife, and that I love my children. But the question is how these cares affect ​me​ in
my identity. Identity and care are related by way of the simple concept that identity comprises a
particular arrangement of cares, a hierarchy of sorts that places certain cares before others. In this
hierarchy, we define who we are because we say what we care about most, namely, the type of
action we most desire and are most willing to take in the world.

In my case as a husband, teacher, and parent--three cares amongst some others--it would be
difficult to define whether husbandry or parenting is more important to me, and as we’ll find, at
least part of our consideration should be which one ​ought​ to be more important. I can’t answer
that in earnest because, while marriage is sacramental, parts of its sacramentality is fulfilled in
procreating and parenting together. Thus, more generally, I can say that I identify as a family
man first and foremost, and then I likely identify as a teacher, placing my students high in my
ordering of cares but lower than my identity as a family man.

Cares relate to identity by organizing not only secondary and tertiary cares but the minor desires
that also pop up. It provides us a roadmap and way forward in the world, so long as we are free
to act on our cares and not bound by addictions of whatever kind; we can define who we are,
who we will be in each and every moment, and what we care to become.

In this regard, we find our identities in a strange place: between who we actually are in the world
and what we actually care about as based in our will, and who we want to become and what we
want to will in the world, whether we’re currently capable of doing so or not. And we can define
for ourselves the undertakings necessary for becoming who we want to be, outlining the cares
necessary to get us to the developed identity.
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Spirituality and Desire Part II

In the previous lecture, we talked about care and identity, especially identity as that place
between who we actually are and what we want to become. We will make a turn in this lecture
only to circle around back to desire in due time. We now jump into the complex idea of the
human spirit and spirituality. What are these things and what have they to do with desire?

Let’s begin with the notion of the human spirit and what it is. We could go any number of
directions with this question, and certainly we all have a vague and what I’d call common-sense
notion of what spirituality is. But it’s important to get into the specifics of a definition here so
that you may, in your subsequent reflections, analyze and assess the definition and the argument
of which it’s a part.

When I discuss the human spirit, I do so not from the standpoint of some separable part in the
human person, say, in contrast to the body, for instance, the notion of the pure soul. Certainly
soulfulness, depending on what we mean by spirit, is involved, and spirit involves elements of
what theologians would call the rational soul. No, by spirit I’m referring to what Kierkegaard
inauspiciously calls and hilariously calls the self, i.e., which he defines as “a relation that relates
itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in relation.”2 Thanks so much Kierkegaard! Our
point in bringing it up is precisely found in the idea that Spirit, in sum, is what allows us to form
our identities.

How?

If we jump back into the notion of care--or an elongated and potentially self-identifying desire--
and note that we are both first- and second- order cares and desires, what we can say is that the
self is that process and action within us that relates second-order desires to first-order desires us
by virtue of our capacity to think. Or, rather, to make the idea more concrete at the level of
desire: if I have a desire to have a BBQ chicken pizza, but I also want to live longer than my
father did so as to be there for my family, then the spirit or the self is the process of me thinking
through myself, my values, and asking myself which of these desires I’ll put first and why. That

2
​Kierkegaard, ​Sickness unto Death​, ed by Hong and Hong (Princeton, 1990: Princeton University Press).
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is, I ought, on the grounds of my duties as a father, to put my family first and refrain from eating
the pizza, and the process of coming to that conclusion ​self-consciously​--in attending to my
reasoning processes and asking myself if I’m doing all of this well--we can say is the spirit
within the human person. That is, spirit is our process of forming our identities, relating
second-order cares that have been vetted and evaluated to first order desires and cares.

So what?

Well, there’s a lot at stake in this particular idea of spirit if we’re willing to delve a little more
deeply into it. Why do we make the choices that we do in relationship to ourselves? Why do we
act on one care or desire rather than another? ​How are we choosing who we want to become?​
This last question is critical, especially from a Catholic perspective as we’ll see. We do so by
means of a criterion which defines whether or not a care or desire is better than another. What I
mean is this.

If we make a decision about ourselves thoughtfully and within the realm of spirit about which of
the desires or cares of ours that we’d like to emerge as a part of our lived-identity, then we do so
based on a criterion, either implied or explicit. An implied criterion means that we take up what
I’d call a commonsense view of things (namely, how a culture defines what we ought to do) and
act that out somewhat unconsciously. For instance, it tends to be common sense that we ought to
avoid violence at all costs. But we only hold this view implicitly if our home hasn’t been broken
into with our family home, wherein violence may become an option for an otherwise peaceful
person.

Thus, an explicit criterion means that we’ve gone through the trouble of formulating for
ourselves a worldview, ordering and putting the world together for ourselves in a thoughtful
manner and in such a way that we can evaluate ourselves in relationship to the world. We can
formulate for ourselves why we’re doing what we’re doing: I will avoid violence whenever
possible, putting the lives and safety of my family above one who attempts to attack them, thus
allowing myself violence in those instances. Or, to use an easier example, I’m not eating pizza
right now because my kids are more important to me--or at least ought to be--than the immediate
pleasure of eating a BBQ chicken pizza. And that would be a correct assessment of the situation.
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Needless to say, spirituality is decidedly caught up with the latter of these two possibilities,
namely, that when we are entering into a spiritual frame of mind, we’re entering a world that we
have come to make sense of, evaluating the choices that we have made in light of the world as
we understand it. We have some sort of grasp of who we are, who we want to become, and why
we want to become that someone.

But here’s the key to the notion of spirituality as such: if indeed spirituality involves this process
of having a worldview and deciphering identity in light of this worldview, then the human spirit
and the spirituality that emerges from it means something more than how we’ve defined it: as
merely reflecting on the self. In using a worldview to spiritually define ourselves, the spirit
presupposes a self-reflective connectedness to all things. Or, at the very least, it knows that in
defining a worldview, it’s attempting to define the relationship of the self relative to all the other
things that surround and define the self--the cosmos as a whole and, in the best cases, the God
who created such!

This is a mouthful, and I want to take a minute to refresh. The spirit is the activity of relating my
first and second order cares to one another based on a worldview to produce an identity. That I
have a worldview implies that I have a relationship to and am connected with all things in some
basic manner. Thus, the spirit is the self-reflective connection of the human person in
relationship to all things, and spirituality is the conscious development of a better understanding
of this connectedness as it relates to who I become.
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Spirituality and Desire Part III

Once more, the spirit is the activity of relating my first and second order cares to one another.
Spirituality is doing so as based on a worldview so as to produce an identity. As stated, that I
have a worldview implies that I have a relationship to and am connected with all things in some
basic manner. In this regard, the spirit is the self-reflective connection of the human person in
relationship to all things, and spirituality is the conscious development of a better way of acting
in relationship to this connection.

However, if we stopped with this lecture here, then spirituality would be a purely humanistic
endeavor, connected with human spirit alone, and maybe indistinct from what we call “ethics”: a
way of forming ourselves based on what we think right and wrong are. Or if it’s not ethics, it’s at
least a spirituality without God, which may seem contradictory without knowing some Buddhist
thought. After all, the point with Buddhists is to overcome one’s desires (or cares) altogether so
that one’s no longer caught in the suffering produced by desire! But generic visions of
spirituality aside, the Christian vision of spirituality by no means ends with what’s been said. If
fact, you might even say that we began in the wrong place in talking about the human spirit
rather than the Holy Spirit!

The starting place, however, was a pragmatic decision on my part, and, as mentioned at the
beginning, I’m purposefully trying to throw us all off our game so that we can’t simply rest in
easy ideas of what we thought to be the case; that spirituality is summarized by a type of prayer,
or an especially holy liturgy. That said, I move back to my definition of spirituality, which we’ll
begin to look at in a new light.

Yet again, spirit is the self-reflective process of evaluating and enacting certain cares not based
on the immediate desires themselves but as based on a reflective and explicit worldview, in
relationship to all things. This worldview helps me to evaluate who I want to become in my
identity and why. The question from a Christian standpoint, however, should surface rather
immediately: from whose standpoint are you evaluating yourself and the world? How are you
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gathering for yourself a worldview? How are you relating yourself to Everything about
everything?!

We have any number of answers that we might offer from the history of philosophy. For
instance, culture and its practical experience may be one such viewpoint. A people gathers a
worldview for itself based on the best thoughts and traditions of its practical know-how, and I
believe that point is absolutely important and true. Peoples are defined by their traditions in such
a way that there is no way to become completely free from the tradition into which you were
born. But who’s to say that this cultural standpoint is anything other than helpful, uself,
pragmatically true? Pragmatic truth does not yield, however, actual truth, and actual truth alone
is worthy of grounding our worldview, at least if we’re taking the chance of defining and
evaluating our identities as based upon such. We are interested, after all, in a knowledge of
everything about everything so that we might relate our identities to this world well. Culture may
offer a worldview, but it inevitably errs on certain points.

We can find another important way of defining a worldview in, say, reason. By the power of
reason we can understand and make cases for our interpretations of the world, this is for sure.
But reason itself wants to know everything about everything, and although it can make reasoned
opinions about particular subjects, rarely does it find the ​full​ truth. After all, we’re finite: we’re
born and we die, and in between we rely on certain assumptions about how things work just to
get by. We simply cannot know, from the standpoint of reason at least humanly enacted,
everything about everything. We can’t come close, which is why the endpoint of ​true​ reason is
found in the recognition that, as Socrates notes, I’m not nearly as wise as I thought I was! Reason
ought to lead me to my limitations as a reasonable being, which is actually a much more honest
way of relating oneself to all things than that of culture. After all, at least from the standpoint of
reason, every identity becomes provisional, open to new knowledge as it emerges precisely
because one interpretes everything about everything in the form of a question, saying, I don’t
know yet.

Alas, we come to another option for forming a worldview. The most prevalent form of creating a
worldview is found in the self and its appeasement. We tend to form the world in accordance
with our singular take on the world, ignoring the wisdom of tradition and reason for the satiation
of immediate desire. Take a look at advertisements. A recent Dr. Pepper ad, for instance, begins
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with a young man commuting to work, getting off of a train and drinking a Dr. Pepper. He takes
his suit coat and button up off to reveal a t-shirt in Dr. Pepper colors that says “I’m one of a
kind,” all while an overly dramatic song in the background is crooning “Gotta do me.” The
commercial unfolds as you could expect: a cavalcade of persons wearing similar shirts with
similar media-defined slogans on them, insinuating that people are their own unique and
authentic self if they drink Dr. Pepper. Today’s slogan seems to be “You do you,” as if the
standards of this world in which we live are merely ours to do with what we want, alter and bend
to our egos’ desires, which, alas, we can do to no small degree through technological means,
sometimes for good, oftentimes for mediocre reasons, and some for ill.

I will take special note of this manner of spirituality and identity formation. Pope Francis, Pope
Benedict, and St. Pope John Paul II all note this form of worldview formation. Pope Francis
refers to it as a consumer mentality toward life, and it is supported by what he calls a
technocratic worldview. That is,

the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development ​according to an
undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm​. This paradigm exalts the concept of a
subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains
control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific
and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery
and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something
formless, completely open to manipulation.3

The human person thinks itself God.

Either way, from a Catholic perspective, all these worldviews fail in some manner, falling sway
to the finitude into which we are born. In this sense, reason and even worldly traditions hold a
special place in the Catholic faith, reason being even a celebrated forerunner to faith, but the
selfishness of egoism and the technocratic worldview holds none. In fact, we would be well
advised to take note that this worldview seems to be at the basis of original sin and Adam and

3
Pope Francis, ​Laudato Si​, paragraph 106,
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.htm
l, accessed January 21, 2019
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Eve’s fall. They say no to God and yes to themselves, believing that they in their finitude know
better than the infinite God. They attempt to remake creation into their own image. In the
worldview of egoism, we find our basest moment as a species.

Accordingly, we’re stuck. If we lose reason, culture and self as a manner for creating a
worldview, the question remains as to whether there is any worldview that could foster
something otherwise? And, if so, what has it to do with spirituality?

Maybe we first jump back to the point of this lecture and note that its interest is, yes, in human
spirituality but not humanistic, and we’ve introduced nothing other than the human yet. Rather
than discuss the human spirit, what about the Holy Spirit? Indeed, the Holy Spirit is that person
in the Trinity in whom we are healed, and part of the way in which we’re healed is found in the
capacity to be in the Truth, whether or not we can grasp the fullness of Truth. For the Spirit, in
grace, always draws us back to the Lord of creation, the crucified one whose redemptive act
flows from the will of the Father and defines the meaning of this creation.

From the Catholic perspective, the worldview that fosters something more is the worldview
grounded in grace--God’s living action toward us. It is a worldview that is oriented as such to the
sacraments as found in the Church. It is the worldview that looks, from the standpoint of the
divine, to who we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to do, measuring ourselves by
the living icon of the invisible God, Lord, Jesus Christ. It is the human spirit that in the Holy
Spirit, sees itself ​in its​ finitude, giving itself over to the Truth it cannot otherwise attain in the
body of Christ and the teachings of the Church, and this last act precisely describes what I mean
by spirituality in its truest sense. It is within the Church and the Spirit who blesses her that we
are given over to truth.

While I’ve defined spirit as a self-reflective process of knowing oneself and choosing who one
wants to become, a true and genuine spirit is one that can see itself in its own finite incapacity, as
a creature who stands in front of a Creator. (note the relationship to the philosophical worldview,
here.) But in seeing oneself as a creature in front of a Creator, we note that the most foundational
spiritual act is no act at all. It is receptivity that emerges in light of the knowledge of our finitude.
This receptivity and passivity emerges as an openness to the Creator and the Creator’s purposes
and plans for creation, that is, it creates a new worldview now bound up with the Holy Spirit,
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who binds us always to the Logos, Christ Jesus. And because the Creator is the Truth who
orients all identities, the worldview itself is not only relatively true but absolutely so. In the grace
of the Holy Spirit, we see that our identities are not our own but are found only in giving
ourselves to the infinite God who loves us back, offering us ourselves and our purposes in the
process of living us.

The purposes offered each of us is no secret in the Church, which bring us back to the idea of
desire that we have talked about. Our purposes, as said, are to reform our desires so as to become
like the living Lord, Christ Jesus, being empowered by the Holy Spirit through the sacraments to
do so. We are to take the multitude of desires that we see within ourselves, ranging from the love
of child to the lust for other men or women, and we are to properly order these desires once again
in accordance with the Word of God as spoken in the Church, conforming the desires to the
sacrament that lives within us.

We are to take the egoism--the defiant human spirit--that self-righteously tempts us all and that
seeks to control this creation, submitting it to our desires and egos. We are instead to ask for the
grace to enter into creation as the Creator intended it, even in this creation’s falleness. And
though this creation be fallen, we are given to it as potential co-healers, the New Israel, so that
we might, with our Lord and through the Holy Spirit now within us, affirm the most unpragmatic
and dangerous of worldviews, orienting our identities and desires toward such. The worldview is
summed up by saying:

3​ “Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 ​Blessed are they who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
5 ​Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the land.
6 ​Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be satisfied.
7 ​Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
8 ​Blessed are the clean of heart,
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for they will see God.

9 ​Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
10 ​Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 ​Blessed are you when ​people​ insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil
against you because of Me. ​12 ​Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the
same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:3-11, NASB)

We can go further, for we have been given direct manners in which to act out this
identity-forming worldview through the body of the one who makes these declarations. So, we as
a Church are told to:

feed the hungry

shelter the homeless
clothe the naked
visit the sick and imprisoned
bury the dead
give alms to the poor
Instruct
advise
console
comfort
forgive
bear wrongs patiently

In a move toward genuine Christian spirituality, then, we do not begin with ourselves, but we
begin with an openness to the divine as found in Christ, and thus the teachings of the Church.
The spirit and teachings of the Church ground a worldview that we cannot otherwise attain in our
finitude: a true worldview. As spirit, we reflect on its edicts and form ourselves, by grace and in
the Holy Spirit, in accordance with the truth, which is always oriented toward the self-giving act
of charity. Charity, as defined by the Beatitudes and Works of Mercy, comes to form our
identities, our long-term and definitive cares, and we must the enter into the difficult task of
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subjecting the rest of our desires and cares--our identities--to the truth of these criterion. Such is
at least one form of genuine Catholic spirituality.

In this regard, it should be no secret why I have chosen the hymns that I have for our mutual
worship. The Canticle of the Sun, written by St. Francis, and All Creatures of Our God and King,
at least inspired by St. Francis, draw us into the same spiritual moment that we defined as
foundations: that we, like brother sun and sister moon, are finite. That we are not owners of this
creation but a part of it. That we have a place in this creation that is not ours to define. We are
wise when we recognize this fact and forego our authoritarian desire, reflective as it is of original
sin, to subject God’s creation to our wills; rather, we must subject our spirit to the power of grace
to become once again a part of God’s good order through the new Adam, Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Amen.