Desire more desire

”It would seem that 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 to 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.” (CS Lewis, Weight of Glory)

”The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He created the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered , they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating?” (CS Lewis, Weight of glory)

CS Lewis is a poet as well as a theologian and writer, and I thank God for him. It's easy to think that spiritual growth requires us to suppress our desires, but what we really need is an explosion of real desire. Real joy and desire does terrible things to sin. We're too dull, too easily satisified with the titbits we get from stuff in this world. Sin isn't just wicked, but it's pathetic, empty and joyless. Sin's work is really to dull any real desire in me, to suppress my passion and to make me happy with a fast food diet instead of a banquet. It's funny that we often think God's the one who is telling us to calm down and behave - cos that is precisely what sin does. It enslaves our joy and desires. I fight sin, then, by inflaming my desire for the one thing that can infinitely satisfy it: the wonderfully holy and loving fellowship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.