Healthy restlessness
IN today’s gospel, a man afflicted with leprosy tells Jesus: “Lord, if you want to, you can make me clean.” Jesus replies: “Yes, I want it. Be healed”(Mk 7:24-30).
This is not just an exchange of words. It is a conversation fueled by mutual desire. The leper yearns to be healed; Jesus wants to heal him. The dialogue illustrates how divine mercy effectively addresses human misery.
Christianity is not a religion that aims to abolish, suppress, or repress desire. In fact, it encourages and even impels us to get in touch with the deepest longing of our hearts. Without desire, Christianity becomes a catalogue of obligations, formulaic prayers, and rituals that we perform with enervating regularity.
Calling desire as “healthy restlessness,” Pope Benedict XVI advises us to experience, intensify, and expand it because, by an ironic twist, only in this way will we realize that nothing in this world can fully satisfy us. As St. Augustine confesses: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God.”
Sadly, many of us have invariably equated such healthy restlessness with “appetite” or “craving” for food, drink, sex, and other activities that offer quick but short-lived pleasures. Worse, we are easily tempted to resort to drugs, dangerous sports, gambling, or extramarital liaisons, as substitutes for those pleasures that fulfill our deepest needs.
Lately, advances in information technology have spawned among us an unrelenting obsession for pleasures that are digitally induced and vicariously experienced. Many young people today satisfy their desire for affirmation by the number of likes that they get for their pictures and posts in the social media. For the sake of speed and convenience, couples now derive more pleasure from e-mails and tweets than face-to-face communication. Millions of netizens have become unthinking followers of celebrities, bloggers, reality TV, and fashion icons through whom they virtually experience their desire for public notice and approval.
When authentic human desire is subverted, denied, or supplanted by our passion for cheap thrills and vicarious pleasures, our longing for transcendence takes a back seat. Desire becomes a frantic clawing at anything that will medicate the emptiness within.
I once heard a wife complain: “After 10 years of marriage, it seems that my husband no longer desires to kiss me. He does it like a robot, without feeling or passion. It is unbearably painful to be kissed out of habit or sheer determination.”
God does not want to be an object of duty and obligation. He wants to be desired, to be needed, to be wanted, and above all, to be passionately loved.
We always run faster when we lose our way. If we have grown tired pursuing pleasures that satisfy us for a while but leave us emptier than before, then, like the leper in the gospel, let us ask God to provoke our deepest longing, awaken it, unmask and reveal it in all its naked desperation, until we can say: “O God, you are my God; my soul thirsts for you, my body pines for you like a dry weary land without water” (Psalm 62).