Mud Pies

Last week I mentioned C.S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory as a great opener to a discussion about Desire. There is a lot on this subject in all his writings, actually, since it was one of his favourites.

Here’s why I think Desire is an important idea to be thinking about:

Christian life is all about embracing Christ and who He is, and becoming more and more like Him. Our will is at the centre of our identity, and it is the alignment of our will with His that makes our connection with Him stronger and stronger. 

In our discussions of Christian life, at church or with our friends or online, we often come across the phrase God’s will. We also get plenty of opportunity to think about our own will: what does it mean to have free will, and how to submit our own will to God’s.

Desire, be it God’s desires or our own, is something much less talked about, although the overlap with the notion of will is obvious. It is however, I think, a good term to reintroduce or add to our vocabulary and thinking, because, whereas the word will comes across as quite stern, fixed, austere and intimidating, the word desire brings out the element of yearning, of longing for something beautiful and dear, and encourages us towards action.

People whose natural instinct is to resist expectations do not feel the urge to jump when they are presented with a bar raised high. But they do want to run, jump, fly to get to what they desire! Desire is what moves the human heart to action, and I think Christians can find great help if they overcome the fears attached to this concept because of its misuse by larger culture, and start to better understand and intentionally cultivate their holy desires.

That’s what C.S. Lewis is helping his audience do, throughout all his writings. After reading The Weight of Glory yet again, I decided to use the structure of this particular writing on Desire to inform a few of my blog posts from now on.

Last week I linked to The Gospel Coalition’s website, where Justin Taylor gives a great summary of The Weight of Glory, capturing its main ideas. Here’s my own outline of the essay – I’m not going into details about the content, just listing my headings for the seven parts I have identified: 1. Don’t be too easily pleased! 2. Obedience and perseverance reveal the desirability of God and of the reward He promises. 3. Our experience points to something beyond itself as the real object of desire, the attainment of which is, though, not guaranteed. 4. What does the Bible present and promise as the rightful objects of our desire? 5. An examination of glory: Glory as ‘being approved and noticed by God’ and 6. Glory as ‘being united with beauty’, and finally 7. We need to focus on the glory of our neighbour. 

Today I’d like to have a little look at the first thing on the list, and then I’ll close with some questions for us to think about.

Lewis notices how the culture of his time seems to have elevated ‘Unselfishness’ as the chief of virtues. He criticizes this and calls it a ‘negative ideal’, as if ‘our abstinence and not [other people’s] happiness was the important point’. He contrasts it with the Christian virtue of Love, and goes on to note that, although following Christ does include a lot of self-denial, that is not an end in itself. Rather, ‘every description’ in the New Testament of what we will find, if we do take up our cross and follow Christ to the end, ‘contains an appeal to desire’.

Nowadays, the idolizing of unselfishness and self-denial – even self-denunciation – is still very much present in our culture, and is at the root of a lot of the “virtue signalling” that’s going on as we speak. 

But so, paradoxically, is a preoccupation with our own, individual happiness. The wartime generation had survival and the common good at the forefront of their minds, and they might even have had ‘the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing’ – and the same might be true of many people today, anxious at the thought of impending climate catastrophe, and such. However, it is no less true that “the pursuit of happiness” is the intense and all-consuming preoccupation of our present day Western culture.

Some people want to save the planet. Some people are passionate about social justice. All people want to be happy. Very few know much of what the Bible teaches about our “blessed hope” for “the age to come”. Most of our contemporary ideas about transcendence are vague, confused and erroneous. I think we all find ourselves, just as much as people in 1941, in the way of the temptation to mistake good things like self-denial, or happiness, for ends in themselves.

That is why Lewis’s famous admonition from the first paragraph of The Weight of Glory applies to us, I feel, just as strongly as to his own generation! It is so often quoted that I think many of us already know it by heart, but it bears being transcribed here: ‘Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. 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.’

Later on in his essay Lewis says: ‘If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy.’ 

There is a distinction to be made not only between covetousness and desire, but also between the desiring of good things and the desire for the ultimate Good.

In a previous article, I was talking about the shortsightedness which often keeps me focused on ‘mud pies’ of immediate appeal, instead of the wide horizons which God has opened for me.

Not only are there lots of distractions that can quickly be identified as such, but even properly good things can become mud pies, when mistaken for all the joy there is to be had. The questions I’d like to close with are: First, what am I coveting? What am I ‘fooling around’ with? Then: What temporal, finite, goods am I desiring and toiling for, mistaking them for that which truly satisfies? Do I know what God is actually offering me?

I hope you will join me in further reflecting on these questions.