Prayer as Desire
[“As the deer pants for flowing streams, so my soul pants after You, O God. . . .my entire being longs for You; my body pines for You. . . .” (Ps 42:1 & 63:1, resp).]
[“Anyone who wholeheartedly wishes for God, has what he longs for, because no one can love God unless he possesses already the one that he loves” (Gregory [c.540-604]).]
O Lover,
The inclusion of desire as a motif of Christian spirituality has early origins. Perhaps most noteworthy a contributor was Pope Gregory, known variously as the “Great,” the last of the Patristics, and, interestingly, the “Doctor of Desire.” In mid-2021 I wrote a post here (“Gregory on Desire”) in which I initially explored this aspect of the spirituality of the Sérvus Servórum Déi. Now, never outside You, I sense impetus to attempt to say more.
A major surprise for me has been that even as the hold of doctrinal fabrications of You keeps atrophying, the gloaming of the gods, the longing for You can be growing rather than diminishing (or disappearing). Across these four intervening years this disposition of yearning has increased within me, albeit sometimes fitfully. While desire, broadly speaking, can involve a major role for the intellect and other faculties, particularly when the attractiveness of an object is fondled, it can also find expression largely beyond word, thought, image, or imagination, beyond depictable object. It is my experience that when You are no longer viewed as within the subject/object gestalt but its very Depth, its Grunt (Eckhart’s “Ground’), its Abyss, desire for You can continue within us finites, indeed episodically thrive. Gregory is astonishingly saying that more than mere preparation or escort, desire can already be the possessing of You! The spirit, if not the exact letter, of this declaration is imbued in I Peter 1:8 which I paraphrase thus: “And though I have not seen You, I long for You; and though I cannot depict You, I am filled by You with inexpressible joy” (1:8). So strongly is the disposition of desire weighted by the Doctor.
Of late I have been increasingly drawn by the work of Thomas Keating and Cynthia Bourgeault regarding the practice of what I call apophatic (“without images”) prayer. There is emerging within me a strong correlation between the infinite wideness of Your Agápe and the exceptionless inadequacy of all depictions of You, between Your indescribability and the promise of the disposition of desire in the subsequent silent void. Thus such a “prayer of desire,” not unlike “centering prayer” in Keating’s words, rather than being oxymoronic, flows implicitly out of Your ineffabiliity. While the practice of letting slip all objectivizings often remains for me as fraught and uneven as ever, I am being persuaded that longing for You amid Your kenósis (“self-emptying” [Phil 2:7]), not totally unlike my own, is already the experiencing of You.
But, as my esteemed colleague (Herr Reason) might counter: is not then the core of this notion of a “prayer of desire” nothing less than a void, a cipher, an absence, a vacuity? Is not this entire post a pious attempt to obfuscate what is finally the loss of the faith? With him for whom all of the gods live on, the answer to these questions may indeed be ”yes.” But for one for whom the totality of the contents of the subject/object gestalt must submit to gelássenheit (“releasement”), an open horizon begins to emerge. Before You I bear witness that the panting and the pining, the hungering and the thirsting, the longing and the desiring, the yearning and the aching: they persist, this whether I perceive You as “Darkness” or “Light” (Ps 139:12), Absence or Presence. Thus, O Lover, I continue to go with the desire; I long for You still.
