Contrary to what many people think, biblical Christianity is fond of desire. Scripture presents enjoyment and satisfaction in a brightly positive light, yet we are also taught in Scripture where to primarily direct our desires if they are to be fulfilled and dissuaded from and shown the emptiness of the man’s misguided quest for fulfillment in all the wrong things. Christians can discover healthy avenues for desire and simultaneously learn that our lives are not built around the pursuit of satisfaction. God fixed our desires in us. The mistake many people make is that they will be satisfied through the unchecked pursuit of satisfaction. Yet these impetuous searches are most often unrealistic and always unfulfilling. Desire is good but, to quote Jeremiah, ‘we hew out cisterns that can hold no water’ and wonder why we are perpetually thirsty.

I recently read David Gemmell’s Troy trilogy and in the second book, Shield of Thunder, Gemmell’s Aeneas is dying in bed, feverish and faint from an infected wound, when he has a vision of an immense Mycenaean soldier who fought and died beside him in a defense of Troy. He tells Aeneas that we are tiny flickering flames in the dark for no more than a heartbeat, “When we strive for wealth, glory and fame, it is meaningless. The nations we fight for will one day cease to be. Even the mountains we gaze upon will turn to dust. To truly live we must yearn for that which does not die.” These are arrestingly wise words. But what is the undying that we must yearn for? What is the true life that striving for will not result in those familiar feelings of being unfulfilled despite gratifying our desires?

C.S. Lewis, in his essay The Weight of Glory, memorably wrote of our vain pursuit and misplaced expectations, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” The pursuit of real Joy, what we might call the answer to our desires longings, is the obvious theme of Lewis’ autobiographical work, Surprised by Joy. Alister McGrath’s recent biography of Lewis highlights Blaise Pascal as one of Lewis’ implicit influences, for the French philosopher said that man has an “infinite abyss” inside of him that can only be filled by an “infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” It is not a far step from here to the too oft quoted words of Augustine in Confessions, “You [God] stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, wrote in Truce of God that unreal desire stumbles from moment to moment desperate to gratify an immediate hunger. That hunger, writes Williams, is not realised as part of being human and therefore incapable of being plugged by our endless attempts. He goes on to say that we mistakenly set out to organise all things around our self, rather than seeing Christ as the magnetic centre of all things. There is one Person who can satisfy us, for whom we were made, yet we exchange that desire for wanting everything else and tragically spend our lives thinking those many things will replace the single and satisfactory one. Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman at the well have never been truer, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I will give them will never be thirsty again.”