When Desire Becomes Prayer

The Heart’s Long Return to Wonder

“Love is sweeter than life.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian

There are desires that disappear when they are satisfied.

And there are desires that become deeper.

We spend much of our lives learning the difference.

At first we imagine that desire is a kind of emptiness. Something is absent, and so the heart reaches toward it. We desire recognition, security, belonging, understanding. We desire a place in the world where our life will finally make sense.

Even our spiritual desires can take this form.

We want clarity.

We want certainty.

We want to know what God is doing.

We want the road ahead illuminated sufficiently that we can walk without fear.

But the Fathers gradually teach us something stranger.

The deepest desire is not healed by possession.

It is healed by communion.

The heart does not finally want answers.

It wants God.

Perhaps this is why the spiritual life so often becomes simpler as it becomes deeper.

Not easier.

Simpler.

Things that once seemed indispensable begin quietly to fall away. Questions that consumed us lose some of their urgency. The future remains unknown, but somehow its unknownness becomes less threatening.

Something else has become more compelling.

Christ Himself.

St. Isaac the Syrian speaks of the spiritual life with an almost unbearable tenderness because he understood that repentance is ultimately inseparable from wonder.

We often imagine repentance as looking downward upon our failure.

Isaac teaches the heart to look up and become astonished at mercy.

The question slowly changes.

No longer merely:

How have I failed God?

But:

What kind of God continues to love like this?

And there begins wonder.

The soul discovers that it has spent years thinking about itself while God has been quietly giving Himself.

Every breath.

Every mercy.

Every unexpected consolation.

Every person through whom love reached us.

Every wilderness through which we thought we were walking alone.

Even our longing for Him.

Especially our longing for Him.

For perhaps the greatest wonder is discovering that our desire for God began in God’s desire for us.

We thought we were searching.

We were being sought.

We thought we were knocking.

Someone had already been standing at the door.

We thought the ache within us proved that something was missing.

Perhaps the ache itself was already grace.

This changes the meaning of desire.

Desire ceases to be something we must satisfy.

It becomes something we can offer.

And offered long enough, desire becomes prayer.

Sometimes there are no words left for that prayer.

One simply remains.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

Again.

And again.

Until even the distinction between longing and prayer begins to disappear.

The Name carries both.

The heart no longer needs to explain what it wants because the Name contains everything it desires.

Jesus.

There are seasons in life when this becomes especially clear.

Much can be taken from us without our consent.

Certainties.

Plans.

Roles.

Strength.

People we love.

The image we once carried of our future.

Even certain ways of serving God that we assumed would always belong to us.

At first such stripping can feel only like loss.

But hidden within it may be another mercy.

For when enough secondary things have fallen away, the heart begins to discover what it cannot lose.

The Fathers went into the desert not because creation had ceased to be beautiful but because they wanted to discover what remained when nothing stood between the heart and God.

And what they discovered was not emptiness.

They discovered wonder.

A scrap of bread became gift.

Water became miracle.

A brother became Christ.

The night sky became a sanctuary.

A single word of Scripture could sustain years of prayer.

The Name of Jesus became an inexhaustible country of the heart.

Perhaps we lose wonder because we possess too much.

We name things and imagine we therefore know them.

We explain grace.

We organize mystery.

We become accustomed even to God.

The desert undoes this familiarity.

It makes everything strange again.

And therefore beautiful.

One begins to awaken in the morning with the astonishment that there is another day in which to love.

Another opportunity to repent.

Another human being to receive.

Another hour in which Christ may be remembered.

Another breath in which His Name may be spoken.

This is not sentimentality.

Wonder is born from seeing reality without the veil of entitlement.

Nothing had to exist.

I did not have to exist.

No one owed me Christ.

And yet:

He is here.

This is why the saints can sometimes appear almost childlike.

They have passed beyond sophistication into astonishment.

They know suffering more deeply than most of us.

They know human darkness.

They know their own hearts.

And nevertheless they remain capable of wonder.

Perhaps because they know these things.

For the person who has encountered his own poverty and then discovered that God has not withdrawn begins to understand something about mercy that cannot be learned from books.

He begins to understand why St. Isaac could speak so extravagantly about divine love.

Mercy is no longer an idea.

It is the atmosphere in which everything exists.

Then desire itself begins to change.

The heart wants less.

And desires more.

Less from the world.

Less from others.

Less certainty.

Less recognition.

Less control over what tomorrow must become.

And yet the capacity for desire becomes immense.

I want God.

Not His gifts.

Not an explanation of His Providence.

Not even consolation.

Him.

And perhaps eventually even that sentence becomes too possessive.

The heart grows quiet.

It no longer says:

I want God.

It simply turns toward Him.

That turning is prayer.

That turning is repentance.

That turning is desire purified of everything except love.

And there, perhaps, wonder returns.

Not because all our questions have been answered.

But because we have discovered something greater than answers.

We are desired.

We are held.

We are being drawn.

And the One toward whom the heart has been traveling was never merely waiting at the end of the road.

He was within every step.

Within every longing.

Within every loss.

Within every moment of beauty that wounded us with the intuition that there must be More.

Perhaps that is why desire can never finally be separated from wonder.

Desire whispers:

There is more.

Wonder answers:

He is here.

And prayer is what happens when the heart discovers that both are true.