The Root of Our Desires

By Brian Lowther

Today, I finish my series exploring six common human desires and why God instilled them into us. You can read the first four installments here: The Desire for Survival and Pleasure, The Desire for Power, The Desire for Creativity, and The Desire for Love. As I noted in those four posts, I’m writing from the assumption that our desires at their roots are good and programmed into us by God for a good reason. Specifically, I think his reason is to help us participate with him in bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, which is essentially a battle against darkness and evil. 

I’ve hinted in my three previous entries about the deeper motivations behind the desires for power, creativity and love. Namely:  

Power

“If I am powerful, people will respect me. If they respect me, I can respect myself. That’s at the root of the desire for power. The deeper motivation is self-respect.

Creativity

“If I create or achieve something worthwhile, people will ascribe worth to me. If others ascribe worth to me, then I can ascribe worth to myself.” That’s at the root of the desire for creativity. The deeper motivation is self-worth. 

Love

“If others love me, that means I am lovable. If I am lovable, then I can love myself.” That’s at the root of the desire for love. The deeper motivation is self-love.

Dignity

Self-respect, self-worth and self-love can be summed up nicely with the word dignity. To me, the desire for dignity is at the root of these three desires. In fact, I think dignity is perhaps the most crucial of all our God-given desires. Two reasons for this come to mind. 

First, people voluntarily choose to live without all of the desires I’ve explored and can still lead very meaningful, happy lives.

1. Survival: people lay down their lives for the love of country or family. The sense of honor and sacrifice they experience gives theirs lives and deaths great purpose.
2. Pleasure: People forego worldly pleasures, and accept ascetic conditions in view of a worthwhile goal or belief.
3. Power: Many ministry workers choose a life that has no hope of power, wealth, or status.
4. Creativity: People take meaningless, non-creative jobs if they feel they are contributing to a cause they believe in.
5. Love: Monks and nuns go without the love of a spouse, virtuosos and world-class athletes have few true friends [1], and scientists leave family to travel to the Arctic Circle or outer space for the sake of new discoveries.

People can live happily for long durations, even entire lifetimes with one or more of these desires going unfulfilled. However, people can’t live happily without dignity. You may have heard the World War II story of prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp who were forced to move rubble from a bombed-out factory to a nearby field. The next day, they were forced to move the same rubble back to the factory. The next day, back to the field, day after day until they had no dignity left. They lost their will to live and began to provoke the guards to shoot them. [2]

Second, dignity may be the only desire we can pursue without fear of pursuing it too far. All of the other desires come with a dark side.

1. Survival: Pursued too far, this desire can lead to a kill-or-be-killed attitude.
2. Pleasure: Pursued too far, and one becomes a thrill seeker, living a life of debauchery and immoral self-indulgence.
3. Power: Pursued too far and this desire can lead to tyrannical, power-hungry, greedy behavior or anxiety and insecurity because power, wealth and influence can be lost or taken away, and wisdom can be discredited.
4. Creativity: Pursued too far, and this desire leads to work-a-holism or a reclusive life, holed up in some attic finishing your masterpiece.
5. Love: Pursued too far and this desire leads to neediness, which can lead to loneliness and despair, a “nobody loves me” attitude. “A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing,” [3] just watch almost any current reality TV show.

However, my hunch is that dignity has no dark side. One cannot pursue dignity too far because dignity is simply seeing ourselves the way God sees us. No delusions of grandeur, no competitiveness, no self-loathing, just humble, realistic self-acceptance. I’m struck by the verse, “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) He loves us, respects us, and ascribes infinite worth to us just as we are, despite all of our sniffles and hang-ups and pettiness.

This hints at what it means to glorify God: to display his love by receiving it, reflecting it back to him, and refracting it like prisms to ourselves, to our neighbors (Mark 12:31), and to all creation.

Why Did God Give Us this Desire for Dignity?

This concept comes close to the ancient Greeks’ fourth term for love: agape. 

Agape (divine love - the love of God for man and of man for God)

C. S. Lewis used agape to describe what he believed was the highest level of love known to humanity. [4] The term agape has always been used by Christians to refer to the self-sacrificing love of God for humanity. When 1 John 4:8 says "God is love," the Greek word is agape. 

In the cosmic war motif, agape is many things.

1. Agape is how we can hear and understand the voice of the general.
2. Agape is the antidote to the poison of the enemy, which is lies about the character of God.
3. Agape is different than philia; it is beyond philia. Philia is giving your life for your friends. Agape is giving your life for your enemies. This is how Jesus fought and overcame Satan. By loving his enemies, doing good to those who hated him, blessing those who cursed him, praying for those who mistreated him. (Luke 6:27-28). This is what defeats the enemy. The idea of love as a weapon, self-sacrifice as a weapon is counterintuitive, isn’t it? Martin Luther King understood this principle well, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” [5]

The marvelous thing about agape and dignity is that they won’t allow us to live meaningless lives. They won’t allow us to tolerate disease, torture, rape, social exclusion, slavery, humiliation, objectification, or dehumanization. These things aren’t from God. We’re supposed to rail against them. Even people who don’t know God seem to know this instinctively. God wants us to rebel against the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). We were made for proactive resistance against systemic evil. We were made, in short, for freedom.

Former slave, Elizabeth Freeman once wrote, “Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s airth [sic] a free woman—I would.” [6] 

Endnotes

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/kobe-bryant-friends-2015-2
[2] Adapted from “Why in the world am I here” by Rick Warren
[3] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
[4] Ibid
[5] CleverQuotations.com, yyyy.http://www.cleverquotations.com/quote/1498/returning-violence-for-violence-multiplies-violence-adding-deeper-darkness-to-a-night-already-devoid-of-stars-hate-cannot-drive-out-hate-only-love-can-do-that, accessed March 22, 2014.
[6] http://www.thetrustees.org/assets/documents/about-us/press-clips/American-Spirit-Magazine-Elizabeth-Freeman-Feature-March-April2014.pdf

Photo Credit: Austen Squarepants/Flickr

Brian Lowther is the Director of the Roberta Winter Institute

Why Did God Give Us a Desire for Love?

By Brian Lowther

Today I continue my series exploring six common human desires and why God instilled them into us. You can read the first three installments here: The Desire for Survival and Pleasure, The Desire for Power, and The Desire for Creativity. As I noted in those three posts, I’m writing from the assumption that our desires at their roots are good and programmed into us by God for a good reason. Specifically, I think his reason is to help us participate with him in bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, which is essentially a battle against darkness and evil.

Love

Beyond survival, pleasure, power, and creativity I have a deep desire to be loved. In my experience, there is no greater feeling than the engulfing bliss of first love. Romance and fireworks, queasy stomachs and strong sensual passion, it is all absolutely dynamite. I’d go back in a heartbeat to when my wife and I fell in love. Not to change anything, but to relive the intensity of those sublime feelings.

These feelings are undoubtedly good, something I would wish for everyone. But, ultimately they’re just feelings. And, “no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all…But…ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love.” [1] In the best cases, being “in love” matures into a second kind of love, that of deliberate commitment and companionship. This is at the core of what many of us desire: a lasting and happy marriage, where infatuation has faded some but a deeper, quieter devotion has replaced it.

The result of either type of love is often children. And, while children are demanding and often infuriating, I never seem to tire of the pitter-patter of small feet, the funny ways they understand the world, or the joy of their affection after a wearisome day.

Not all of us desire marriage or family, but we all desire meaningful friendships. Friendships are the only form of love that everyone can have: i.e., not everyone has a spouse or a child or even parents.  

Why Did God Give Us this Desire to be Loved?

The ancient Greeks gave humanity something very important when they defined human love with the words: eros (romantic love), storge (family love), and philia (companionship love). [2] I think God gave us the desire for human love for reasons that coincide with these Greek words. 

Eros (romantic love)

If we’re talking in strictly military terms, God may have wanted human beings to fill and replenish the earth (Genesis 1:28) because logically, the bigger army usually wins the battle. Eros is perhaps the most expedient way to ensure that humans would “be fruitful and multiply.” (Genesis 1:28).

Storge (family love)

Parental nurture is in some ways, equivalent to bootcamp. It is preparation for battle. Storge protects us as children, shields us from horror and life-threatening situations, trains us until we’re mature enough to fight for and defend others and ourselves. Not every young person has this protection or training of course, because some children are orphans, or suffer child abuse. But it seems that God’s ideal was and is for us to be protected for a time from battle until we are sufficiently prepared.

Also, God must have foreseen that humanity would learn about him and his enemy in a very gradual way, a progressive arc of revelation through the centuries. Thus, he would have to instill a desire for storge (i.e., respect for elders) as a way to pass down that knowledge from one generation to the next, alleviating the need to start from scratch with every successive generation. 

Philia (companionship love) 

Philia in my mind is very closely related to camaraderie, which is a common word; but it has a very specific meaning in the military. It refers to something much deeper than mere friendship and denotes a strong, shared team spirit, a harmony of purpose and companionship. A close French term is “Esprit De Corps,” which indicates the capacity of a group's members to maintain will power and belief in an institution or goal, especially in the face of opposition or hardship. One can easily see how important this is in war. 

Occasionally we hear of a military group or team bonding as if it were an important milestone. This bonding occurs in the process of toiling together in the heat, marching in the cold, struggling for a common goal, fighting a common foe. When a group strives together and triumphs together, they bond. When they battle side-by-side and face death together, they become closer than family. When soldiers bond in this way, they will give their lives for each other. On the battlefield, it is not so much that you are willing to die for your country, but that you are willing to die for your brother in the trench next to you. This may be what Christ meant when he said, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13).

This is the essence of philia. My hunch is that God programmed us with a desire for philia because in order to destroy any work of the devil, he knew we would need the byproducts of camaraderie: teamwork and invincible morale. On their own, individuals can’t “win a war.” To win a war you need a lot of organized effort. Think of the eradication of smallpox, or the Civil Rights Movement – these things required organized human effort on a massive scale.

Self-love

One last thing I find most interesting about the desire for love: as with my desire for power and creativity, my thought process goes, “If others love me that means I am lovable. If I am lovable, then I can love myself.” That’s at the root of the desire for love. The deeper motivation is self-love. I’ll explore this desire for self-love a bit more in my next and last entry.

Endnotes

[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
[2] The Greeks had a fourth word for love, “Agape,” or divine love, which I’ll cover in my next entry.

Photo Credits: 
1.  Felipe Bastos/Flickr
2. PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE/Flickr
3. Darren Johnson / iDJ Photography/Flickr
4. Ikhlasul Amal/Flickr

Brian Lowther is the Director of the Roberta Winter Institute