Set Your Desires Free

What is it about human love that so moves the soul? What is it about love that ignites chivalry in the father, sacrifice in the mother, and tears from the hearts of the young? 

It is love so deep that it un-selfs us, placing us beyond what we know of our world. It paints us. And when good, it fills us where we are empty; where we hunger.

We are born with an eternal hunger, an eternal thirst for wholeness. And this human love gives us a glimpse of what it is we desire. It “faces us with the mystery that surrounds all existence.”

This is what Pope Benedict XVI said in his Wednesday catechesis this week, in which he addressed man’s mysterious desire for God. He quoted the very first words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, saying:

The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for (No. 27).

It may seem that this desire has faded in secular culture today, but the heart of man so clearly seeks to go beyond itself—in human love, in art, in learning, and in other things that speak beauty and glory. When man surrounds himself with these things, although he does not know it, he moves towards the golden mystery, which engulfs us.

 But until this mystery fills us, our heart is restlessly unsatisfied. Even the perfect spouse cannot fill us alone. What is it then, that quenches what our being cries out for? Who is it that will calm the seas of our mind?

Man’s universal quest for satisfaction, “proves that man is, deep down, a religious being…a ‘beggar of God,’” the Holy Father said.

The eyes recognize objects when they are illuminated by light. Hence the desire to know the light itself, which makes the things of the world shine and thus illuminate the sense of beauty. We therefore must believe that even in our era, seemingly reluctant to the transcendent dimension, that it is possible to open a path toward an authentic religious meaning of life, showing how the gift of faith is not absurd, it is not irrational.

In fact, the gift of faith is a joy! And that is what Pope Benedict suggests we savor and give—the true and authentic joy of faith in God. This joy, which is real, will save us from those things that are not. And it will save us from settling for anything empty and less than our worth.

We are pilgrims on the journey toward our Heavenly homeland, towards that full, eternal good, that nothing can ever take from us. It is not a question of suffocating the desire that is in the human heart, but of freeing it, so that it can reach its true height. When desire is open to God, this is already a sign of the presence of faith in the soul, faith that is a grace of God. 

Accepting God as the One who satisfies is liberating. It is freedom! Search yourselves, purify, and make way for the fullness of God’s brilliant joy.

Totus Tuus!