When Desire Doesn’t Fade
There are two roads: hypocrisy or hunger
“Why is my stomach growling?” is not a question that requires divine insight.
I’m not going to dive into the exact science of it (largely because I don’t know the exact science of it), but I can summarize it pretty succinctly as this: your stomach desires food, and when you don’t give in, that desire intensifies. Even to the point of becoming audible.
Fasting would be a concept foreign to most animals. At least, it’s hard to imagine a lion saying to himself, “I’m hungry, but I’ve decided to ignore the gazelles for the next few hours.”
What sets man apart from animals isn’t so much the nature of certain desires, but whether or not we can divorce our actions from them.
I was recently reflecting on this during prayer. I find myself frequently asking God to change the desires of my heart to align with His will. Sometimes he does. But frequently, when it comes to more base, intrinsic, or what the world might even consider “natural” desires, the endeavor appears fruitless.
I am left, rosary in hand, stomach still growling, pondering whether that might be the point.
Aristotle said that what makes human life distinctly human is that reason can and should govern appetite. Only a creature capable of saying no to its own hunger, in his view, can be said to have character at all.
The Church Fathers inherited this framework and further refined it. Aquinas described animals following appetite out of necessity, while human beings possess something he called voluntas, or the power of the will to move itself. We can direct our attention away from what we desire and toward what is truly worth choosing.
That seems to mean I am most human not when I desire the things of God, but when I don’t and choose them anyway. It is only in those moments, in fact, that I have the opportunity to rise into the spiritual, transcending the hunger rather than escaping it.
It’s something people have repeatedly observed across every domain, not just the religious. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius discusses his desire to stay under the covers where it’s warm, but resolves that he must go out to do what he was born for. David Goggins mentioned in an interview that he’ll stare at his shoes for an hour in the morning. But he eventually grabs the shoes and goes for a run.
What the world calls “discipline” and what the Church calls “virtue” point to the same thing: the capacity to act in alignment with your ideals regardless of how you feel. It’s realizing that your desires get a vote, not veto powers. Those belong to your will, and your will alone.
And yet, in the West, we have been giving desire more and more floor space in our hearts and minds. The culture in religious communities regarding sexuality is a perfect example.
It is the traditional Catholic position that:
Marriage can only exist between one man and one woman
This bond cannot be dissolved with divorce
Sex is only permissible within the confines of marriage
This sex must be unitive and open to life, which forbids masturbation and contraception
I’ll be honest: writing out this list makes me uncomfortable. It is opposed to modern culture in so many ways and is guaranteed to offend at least one person. My point of including it is not to condemn, but to demonstrate where Christians have become hypocritical.
The first bullet on this list is one that many (though not all) Christians will agree with and hold the line on. They don’t expect anyone with same-sex attraction to have different desires. For some men and women, God does indeed intercede in desire. One famous example is Jackie Hill Perry, who says that God made her fall in love with her husband but that she otherwise remains oriented toward women. But for many others, that change never comes.
Despite this fact, people expect abstinence.
But I have seen desire concoct all kinds of excuses that eat away at the other three standards in the Christian community.
“I desire a relationship too much to withhold from engaging with sexuality or sexually explicit materials,” and then
“It’s not reasonable that my girlfriend and I wait until marriage,” and then
“Our marriage can’t afford to follow the church’s teaching against contraception,” and then
“We no longer want the same things — we need a divorce.”
When people say that Christianity is “hypocritical,” it is less frequently about the church’s actual teaching and more often about how those who profess to believe in it come up with a million excuses to justify or lessen the impact of their own wrong behavior. We are all sinners. We do not have to be perfect. But we must be willing to admit when we follow desires that fall short of the standards we profess.
Because the Church never demanded our desire, it demanded our obedience. And if we wait for desire as a prerequisite, we will be waiting our whole lives.
Those of us who are willing to make these admissions, particularly in areas with greater stigma and social ramifications in church culture, can find ourselves in a uniquely isolating position. We watch others walk (or at least, profess to walk) easily through doors that feel so heavy for us to open. We stumble and fall in areas others don’t speak about or don’t seem to notice. And so we pray with a particular kind of desperation, begging God to simply change what we want because obedience feels impossible when the desire feels persistent, shameful, and loud.
But in spite of the hunger and the ways it sometimes gets the better of me, I am comforted by remembering Christ’s journey to his crucifixion. If he could stumble on the Via Dolorosa, that tells me that a journey full of falling and getting back up again is still a journey that leads to the foot of the cross. And where blood and water gush forth from his pierced side, there is still hope and salvation, however difficult it was to get there.
Jesus models this for us when he prays fervently in the Garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion. He begged God to find another way, a way that aligned with Jesus’s desire not to suffer an agonizing death. But in the end:
“Do what you want, not what I want.”
When we receive the command to take up our cross and follow him, it is not followed by questions about whether that way aligns with our desires, how badly we want it, or whether it comes naturally. The command is simply to follow. Perhaps falling, perhaps hungry for something else, but following nonetheless.
And so I have come to accept that there are certain things I will never stop wanting. But the ache in my stomach doesn’t prevent me from trusting God and sitting with the absence. The audible growl that sometimes erupts from that desire doesn’t have to stop me from doing his will.
In due time — whether in this life, or the paradise to come — I will eat.