Sean at The Blue Boar posts a delightfully bracing excerpt from Hilaire Belloc's The Four Men, which you really should read. In it, a wan and tepid ascetic (The Poet) is taken to task by his companions, because of his pessimistic and puritanical denial of the essential goodness of Creation.
Not that there is not room for asceticism... far from it! But the discipline of the flesh should always affirm and never deny the greatness of God's creative work in nature. All desire - properly understood - is a desire for God. The point of mastering our desires is to properly orient them to their ultimate source - the Creator God - not to deny them altogether.
As I said in Sean's combox;
Life
in Christ means *real* life... with what C.S. Lewis called "some blood
and sap in it". Not the negation of desire (as the Buddha proclaimed),
but the fulfillment of every true and eternal desire of the human
spirit.
Every false desire is simply one of these true desires twisted back on itself. The Gospel does not kill desire, but untwists our desires to make them straight and true again ("true" in this sense like a well-planed board, or the path of a well-crafted arrow), so that we may follow them to their source... the creator God, One in Three.
Every false desire is simply one of these true desires twisted back on itself. The Gospel does not kill desire, but untwists our desires to make them straight and true again ("true" in this sense like a well-planed board, or the path of a well-crafted arrow), so that we may follow them to their source... the creator God, One in Three.
Aye, well spoken.
Posted by: pcNielsen | June 26, 2009 at 02:20 PM