What do I desire when I desire God? Clues for seekers.
The eleventh-century theologian St. Anselm of Canterbury offers us an answer. In his work Proslogion (“Discourse”), he describes himself as someone “who strives to lift his mind to the contemplation of God, and seeks to understand what he believes.” In other words, he begins with a kind of wonder rooted in desire, and he reflects upon that experience in order to find some measure of understanding. To desire God is to “lift the mind,” if we follow Anselm’s idea. There is a long genealogy of this idea, from Anselm to St. Augustine and back to the philosopher Plato. For them, God is to be described in superlatives: “highest,” “best,” “most excellent,” “most perfect,” and so on. God is the sum of all perfections. He is, in the words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “the ever greater one.”
What I desire when I desire God is that which will satisfy my deepest longings for goodness, for truth, and for beauty. Any time I am stirred to seek justice — whether it be racial justice, justice for prisoners, justice for immigrants, or justice for wage earners — I am seeking relationships that bear God’s image. Any time I seek truth — whether it be the truth of the human person, the truth of history’s vagaries, the truth about who I really am, or the truth about what Jesus’ mission was — I am seeking to know certainties about the world that exist because God has loved it into existence. Any time I am stirred by beauty — whether the beauty of heroic sacrifice, the beauty of a sublime work of art, or the beauty of the natural world around me — I behold shadows of the deepest reality of God. My deepest longings reach toward God. The inner compass of my desires finds its true north in God. God is, in the words of the theologian Michael Buckley, “the direction toward which wonder progresses,” the magnet that exerts a pull on the iron filings of my imagination. All true desire lead us to God.
Excerpt from Living Against the Grain
