Heights of Desire

My wife and I climb off the shuttle bus, a little motion sick from the ride up the snowy mountain road to Moraine Lake. We wade through the flocks of tourists milling about the parking lot to get a view of the alpine lake, and when we at last come to the overlook, we are met with a heavenly view: a dazzling liquid sapphire enclosed on three sides by sheer cliffs. The sight leaves us dumbfounded. Not even the fact that we came by this view dishonestly (riding a bus to the top of a mountain) detracts from the scene in front of us.

We have been in Banff National Park for a few days now. We’re not the type of people who typically take expensive vacations, but this year we’re celebrating two special occasions: our anniversary and our thirtieth birthdays. Ever since we arrived, the Canadian Rockies have left us continually at a loss for proper exclamations; we resort to meager outbursts of praise such as “It’s really pretty” and “I can’t believe it’s real!” The other day I made a mental note to work on my vocabulary when I found myself describing a mountain as “so big.” But even the most elevated prose would fall woefully short of these landscapes, I suppose.

However, as the days of our trip go by, I notice something strange beginning to happen: we are growing less and less impressed by the mountains that we see everyday. The new sights are still spectacular, but our day trips often take us up and down the same parkway in the Bow Valley, and the peaks that surround it draw fewer and fewer remarks out of us.

Finally, at the end of the week, it is time for us to leave, and my wife and I pack our bags and check out of our hotel. As we head to the car, I barely even look up at the Three Sisters, three massive peaks that dominate the horizon to the south. We drive down the parkway and out of the mountains. I remember rather guiltily that just a few days ago, on our drive in, we could scarcely believe that these mountains were not a vision of heaven. Now they are commonplace. We dreamt for months about these mountains, arguably one of the most beautiful places on earth. And when we finally stood with their glory spread out in front of us, we quickly began to dream of even higher, wilder mountains: more waterfalls, bigger glaciers, more extreme peaks. How did that transformation occur? We certainly didn’t take them for granted intentionally, it just… happened.

My wife hands me an apple. We continue driving, and I continue thinking about this phenomenon. All the things that we want - money, sex, influence, careers, entertainment, and so on - have the capacity to demonstrate this same pattern we observed in the mountains. In the two short years of our marriage we have already paid off all of our debts from medical expenses and college tuition, and we have built up comfortable savings. We ought to be content, but we still find ourselves fighting over money. Before we got married we dreamt of moving into a house with no roommates, just the two of us. And now that we have, we dream of buying, not renting, and finding a bigger house with some land and fancy furniture. And a sauna.

It seems to me that our desires reach far beyond the tallest peaks, up into the infinite.

But is this true? Do our desires remain perpetually unsatisfied? After all, not everyone is a raging alcoholic or morbidly obese. Not everyone pursues satisfaction to the point of excess. My wife is dozing in the passenger seat as we head back to Calgary, and the mountains are a dark silhouette in my rearview mirror. All things considered, we are content with this adventure. But why? Why can we leave this place satisfied and at the same time wish to see more? Contentment is complicated, I think to myself; I have met many people who are remarkably content, even in the face of poverty. And yet the opposite is apparent as well. A great number of people resemble Sisyphus in their pursuit of desire, continually working towards satisfaction but always falling short. This perpetual struggle can lead to some dark places.

An extreme example of this is Lily Phillips, a UK-based OnlyFans “performer” who recently had sex with one hundred of her subscribers - all strangers - in one day. The documentary about this, put together by Josh Pieters, is harrowing, haunting, and deeply disturbing. In the days leading up to this event, Lily expresses to the camera that she wants to do it. It is not simply a stunt or a cash grab, it is a genuine desire. In the end, after the last stranger leaves her bedroom, she emerges hollow, sobbing, and profoundly emotionally damaged. Satisfaction is nowhere to be seen. Yet, strangely enough, she announces plans to perform the same stunt again, but next time with one thousand strangers.

Hedonists would say that the very existence of desire is a license in itself to go to whatever lengths we choose in order to satisfy it. And this attitude has become ingrained in our modern sensibilities, where it is understood that being “loving” or “kind” or “affirming” is to unquestioningly support others in their behaviors and pursuit of desires. At one point in Lily’s documentary, she explained her plan to a stranger while shopping for an outfit for her big day. The stranger, a middle-aged woman, showed polite interest and even approval for the act. This left Pieters stunned.

On the opposite side of hedonism, various movements of Christianity throughout the centuries have turned to the outright repression of desire as a solution. Take, for instance, the “purity culture” movement of the nineties. Purity culture advocates set out on a massive media campaign with the intent to prohibit premarital sex. While they may have had good intentions, the motivation they provided towards this end was often fear-based, using severe rhetoric and social pressure within church communities to enforce abstinence. Purity was equated with virginity, and it was taught that if you had sex before marriage, you were forever impure: a broken vase, a wilted flower. Books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris went so far as to condemn dating altogether. This movement was so negative in its representation of sex that many millennials found it impossible to view sex, even marital sex, as anything other than dirty and bad. Those who had sex before marriage - especially women - were burdened with an enduring sense of shame, brokenness, and a conflicted view of God’s forgiveness. [1]

If neither hedonism nor repression are productive ways to manage our desires, then how are they to be satisfied?

This is where the work of Thomas Traherne comes in. Traherne, an English poet, theologian, and rector from the mid-17th century wrote powerfully about the magnitude of our desires and how to orient them. In his most notable work Centuries of Meditations, he makes a shocking proclamation that “It is of the nobility of man's soul that he is insatiable.” [2] You can almost hear the purity culture parents recoil in horror. He states that the bottomless capacity of our desire is actually “[man’s] highest virtue, when rightly guided; and carries him as in a triumphant chariot, to his sovereign happiness.” [3]

Traherne’s view is remarkably liberal for his time, though far from hedonistic. He argues that we have been given this magnitude of “want” so that we are able to desire God himself. How else could we desire a relationship with an infinite, perfect being? 

“Wants are the ligatures between God and us, the sinews that convey senses from him into us, whereby we live in Him, and feel His enjoyments. For had we not been obliged by having our wants satisfied, we should not have been created to love Him. And had we not been created to love Him, we could never have enjoyed His eternal blessedness.” [4]

And going even further, he observes that the greater our desire, the greater our satisfaction. God loves us, and it is his pleasure to fully satisfy our desires with his love, perfection, and gifts: “God did infinitely for us, when He made us to want like gods, that like gods we might be satisfied.” [5] “Infinite wants satisfied produce infinite joys; and in the possession of those joys are infinite joys themselves. The desire satisfied is a tree of life.” [6]

If this is truly God’s intention, then we ought to be able to find satisfaction for our desires, no matter how small or great. Traherne agrees, though with an important clarification: “You never enjoy the World aright… till you are convinced that all things serve you best in their proper places. For can you desire to enjoy anything a better way than in God's Image?” [7] Here he speaks of an order to our desires: that everything we want has a ‘proper place.’ It goes without saying that not everything we pursue will be good for us. “Men are made miserable only by abusing [their desire]. Taking a false way to satisfy it, they pursue the wind: nay, labour in the very fire, and after all reap but vanity.” [8] So what are these ‘false ways’ we take to satisfy our desires?

God gave us a whole world full of pleasures and the senses with which to enjoy them. But the things we enjoy by our senses are just the beginning of our pleasure. God gave us these things so that they might guide us toward higher, spiritual pleasures that proceed directly from Him. Traherne encourages us to:

“prize in everything the service which they do you, by manifesting His glory and goodness to your Soul, far more than the visible beauty on their surface, or the material services they can do your body. Wine by its moisture quencheth my thirst, whether I consider it or no: but to see it flowing from His love who gave it unto man, quencheth the thirst even of the Holy Angels. To consider it, is to drink it spiritually.” [9]

When we make the pleasures of our senses an end in themselves, we miss the entire reason we were given them in the first place, and they become supremely unsatisfying. The pleasures of our senses are temporary, and through excessive gratification they become desensitized. Consider how so many “iPad kids” have completely fried their dopamine receptors before they can even walk. However, when we submit our physical pleasures to the lasting spiritual pleasures they represent, we are satisfied. Saint Augustine of Hippo puts this plainly: “The good that you love is from Him; but it is good and pleasant through reference to Him, and justly shall it be embittered, because unjustly is anything loved which is from Him, if He be forsaken for it.” [10]

Let us return to the example of sex: We enjoy the physical sensation of sex, which is good in itself. The physical pleasure, however, is intended to be a representation of the intimacy, love, fidelity, and acceptance in our relationship with our partner, which do not end when the physical experience ends. These are God’s free gifts to us that he has provided through the physical experience. How beautiful it is that we can experience these things with another human being! And they call us still higher, reminding us that we can experience intimacy, love, fidelity, and acceptance in our relationship with God himself, a joy that surpasses everything else. When we make the physical pleasure an end in itself, or when we repress it altogether, we forego the satisfaction that God so liberally intended to give us. Ironically, both Lily and the purity culture victims are left in a similar place.

My wife and I sleepily board our red-eye back to the States, filled to the brim with beautiful memories and about twelve cups of coffee each. Perhaps the reason we are satisfied with our adventure is because our goal was ultimately to connect with one another. We would like to return, and we would also like to see the Alps, the Himalayas, all the most majestic mountains in the world. But I have traveled alone before, and I found that the world is too small compared to the joy of knowing and being known. And if I so enjoy my wife’s love, how much greater is the joy of sharing this with our Creator?

God invites us into a world full of satisfaction. Yes, he may provide boundaries for us, but only that we may enjoy his gifts without becoming dominated by them; so great is the pleasure he intends for us to have. How long will it be until we stop clamoring after the things we want, and rest in the God who has them all infinitely and eternally? This is why Jesus says: "I have come that they might have life, and have it to the fullest extent." (John 10:10) He is the ultimate physical manifestation of the highest good: God Himself.

“Love is an infinite treasure to its object, and its object is so to it. God is Love, and you are His object. You are created to be His Love: and He is yours… And if you love Him, you must of necessity be heir of the world, for you are happy in Him.” [11]

Sources

1: Clinical Considerations of the Evangelical Purity Movement’s Impact on Female Sexuality by Lauryn Leigh Estrada. Published online 24 Sep 2021 in J. Sex and Marital Therapy. Accessed via Taylor & Francis Online (abstract available here).

2-9, 11: Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne. Published 1908 by Bertram Dobell. Full text from archive.org.

2: Century 22, page 16

3: Century 23, page 17

4: Century 51, page 35

5: Century 41, page 28

6: Century 43, page 29

7: Century 38, page 26

8: Century 23, page 17

9: Century 27, page 19

11: Century 52, page 35

10: Book IV [XII] in Confessions by Saint Augustine of Hippo. Published n.d. by Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Full text from ccel.org.