What do you Want?

What do you want? If I had a magic wand and could give you your heart’s desire, right now, what would it be? This is actually a hard question for most of us. Even if you are healthy, if you have food to eat and a warm safe place to sleep at night, there is still a sense of wanting, of a desire for something more that haunts us human beings. There is a hunger in our hearts asking us for…what?

When I began my training as a Spiritual Director some years back, I thought of Spiritual practice as something I SHOULD do. If it seemed dry and boring, that was only as I expected it should be. Imagine my surprise when our teachers suggested we set aside those “shoulds” and instead follow our desire. Now I was raised to believe that each of us has inner wisdom that we should follow. But as human beings living in community, we all get the message, probably many times a day, that we should set aside our desires in order to fulfill our obligations to one another. Remember when you were little and wanted to be a ballerina, a pilot, a professional baseball player, a fireman? (What did you want when you were a child?) We are taught from a young age that to be a responsible adult we must set those desires and dreams aside and do something practical.

When folks come to me for spiritual direction they often confess, perhaps with some guilt or defensiveness, that they don’t have a regular spiritual practice. Why not? Because it would be boring and dry and they don’t have time for it anyway. But most people do have something that makes them come alive, that restores them when they are drained: an afternoon sailing, or walking through he woods. An evening by the fire with family or just pausing to wonder at a beautiful bird. How would you feel if I suggested that following your desire in these ways is a spiritual practice?

What if we believed, with The Rev. Arvid Straube that: “Prayer is simply being in touch with the most honest, deepest, desires of the heart.” What if we believed that feeling of desire is an invitation … an invitation to move into deeper relationship with oneself and with the oneness of all that is? What if our deepest desires come from the divine, lead us back to the divine? Is this some new heresy? Actually, St. Augustine, early church theologian, bishop and church father, described this kind of desire: “restless is the heart until it rest in thee.” He believed that we long for a closer relationship with the divine, that we all have a kind of spiritual hunger built in, and that we feel restless all our lives as we try to move into closer and closer relationship with the Spirit. This holy desire is found in the words of Mystics of many faiths. For example the Sufi poet Rum writes: “I once had a thousand desires. But in my one desire to know you all else melted away.”

To reacquaint ourselves with our own deepest desires, we have to first acknowledge that we are hungry. Sometimes admitting what we really desire is hard because getting it seems impossible. I want inner peace. I want justice for all people. I want to create something beautiful. I want to be part of something larger than myself. And most brazen of all… I want to experience my connection with the divine. When the world assures us that getting a new TV or a new car is a far more reasonable and realistic response to our hunger, one of the most important jobs of our spiritual practice is to “simply being in touch with the most honest, deepest, desires of the heart.”

What do you want? What do you REALLY want? And what would it feel like to honor and follow the part of you that knows?