Desire

I’m reading the book Desire: The Journey We Must Take to Find the Life God Offers, by John Eldredge.  I’m only a few chapters in, but I’m captivated.  I will leave you today with a few excerpts and will discuss these in more detail when I’ve absorbed the totality of the book.  Think about these concepts and let me know your thoughts!

From Chapter 1:

Something awful has happened, something terrible. Something worse, even, than the fall of man. For in that greatest of all tragedies, we merely lost Paradise–and with it, everything that made life worth living. What has happened since is unthinkable: we’ve gotten used to it. We’re broken in to the idea that this is just the way things are. The people who walk in great darkness have adjusted their eyes.

From Chapter 3:

Christianity takes desire seriously, far more seriously than the Stoic or the mere hedonist. Christianity refuses to budge from the fact that man was made for pleasure, that his beginning and his end is paradise, and that the goal of living is to find Life. Jesus knows the dilemma of desire, and he speaks to it in nearly everything he says.
…
Christianity recognizes that we have desire gone mad within us. But id does not seek to rectify the problem by killing desire; rather, it seeks the healing of desire, just as it seeks the healing of every other part of our human being.
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Something has gone wrong in us, very wrong indeed. So wrong that we have to be told that joy is found not in having another man’s wife, but in having our own. But the point is not the law; the point is joy. Need I say more than this: modern Christianity has brought an entire group of people to the point where they have to be told that sex is, in the words of one book, “intended for pleasure.”
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This is the great lost truth of the Christian faith, that correction of Judaism made by Jesus and passed on to us: the goal of morality is not morality — it is ecstasy. You are intended for pleasure!

These ideas are still percolating in my brain.  I’m sure I’ll have something thoughtful to add soon!

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