The Right Channelling of Desire

Like many theologians involved in interreligious dialogue, I have often found my faith challenged and deepened by engagement with a conceptual world that is ‘other’ yet also uncovers swathes of human existence, which are strangely familiar.¹ To that extent, this article fits the mould of Comparative Theology with its focus on learning that leads from an appreciation of another tradition to a deeper understanding of one’s own. In this article, however, I will be less concerned with comparing the wisdom embedded in texts than in reflecting on the forms of spirituality and religious practice that underpin the systematic articulation of faith. Here my theme is desire—or, to be more precise, the purposive act of desiring. The specific context is the intellectual and spiritual dialogue with Buddhism that continues to sustain my intellectual and spiritual life. Despite their being very different in terms of theological vision and philosophical coherence, both Buddhism and Christianity—and other religions in analogous ways—seek to construct a holistic pattern of living which, at least in principle, aims to give a comprehensive account of the way things are. That in itself may be uncontroversial but it raises tricky questions about the continuity (or otherwise) between undiscerned human impulses and emotions, on the one hand, and more noble ideals of virtuous living, on the other.

My initial claim is that desire is given a sense of authenticity and coherence by the manner in which it is shaped by a whole variety of religious disciplines, from ritual performance to social relations. That is not to underestimate the role philosophy plays in clarifying the language used to describe the experience of desire but to foreground the experience itself, an experience with a broad semantic range, from a sense of being drawn by incompletion and lack to a more diffuse confrontation with loss, failure and the tragic dimension of all human living. Whether spelled out in terms of appetites and cravings or an intellectualist drive for understanding and control, desire is more like a mysterious energy than a clearly articulated list of needs and wants. In theory, the comprehensive account is precisely that, promising a satisfactory resolution of the ethical questions and dilemmas of ‘ordinary living’ within a vision of the ultimate truth and value identified as Holy Mystery, however that is spelt out in philosophical or theological terms. In practice, of course, nothing is ever so straightforward. The problem with comprehensive accounts is that they can become too all-encompassing, giving rise not to hope in an open-ended telos of existence but to an expectation that all forms of human desire can be fulfilled, whether in everyday experience or as reframed within an eschatological perspective.

The risk involved in touching into Holy Mystery is something Christian mystics know well—perhaps most especially the first, Paul the Apostle. At the end of his life, held in prison and separated from his friends, he still manages to write with extraordinary joy and inner peace. ‘Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.’ (Phil 3.13–14; New Oxford Annotated Bible; RSV) The image of the spiritual life as a race, with the athlete striving for the finishing line, has about it a moving ambivalence. At the point when he is most constrained and unable to move, Paul is most free. He has to be still; he has no choice. But the ‘straining forward’ to the Holy Mystery he finds ‘in Christ Jesus’ has never been more intense. We will return briefly to Paul at the end of this article when his yearning to be with Christ, and his grief over the loss of his first community of faith finds an unexpected even ecstatic resolution. But first, let us turn to the experience of a very different tradition.

ASCETICAL AND CONTEMPLATIVE

Elsewhere I have used the phrase ‘channelling of desire’ to describe the process of spirituality, what following Raimon Panikkar, I understand as a cross-cultural religious ‘attitude’ towards whatever one takes to have transcendent...