Listening to Our Desires

No, not that kind of desire.

Five years ago, I was burned out… bad. I came back from paternity leave sleep-deprived and struggling to balance fatherhood and ministry. My mental and spiritual health was starting to suffer. I needed help.

A few years prior I had started to connect with Ignatian Spiritual resources like the Examen and a little book of Jesuit prayers that I had stumbled upon after reading Tattoos on the Heart (still one of my favorite books). Ignatian spirituality is a spiritual approach followed by the Jesuit Order, a subset of Catholicism tracing back 500 years to its founder, Ignatius of Loyolla. I had found these Ignatian resources to be a powerful way of connecting with God. In my moment of spiritual crisis, I decided I would try to find an Ignatian spiritual director.

Google brought me to the Office of Ignatian Spirituality’s Find a Spiritual Director page. Pretty soon I was driving to Charlotte to meet with my new spiritual director. Just as I had hoped, I found our meetings to be a time of spiritual refreshment and nourishment. My director asked me good questions, listened to me, helped me grow, and ultimately guided me out of my burnout.

If you think it’s weird for a United Methodist minister to have a Catholic Ignatian spiritual director you can read Bob Tuttle’s Mysticism in the Wesleyan Tradition where he writes about how John Wesley , the founder of Methodism, was influenced by Ignatius and on several occasions accused of being a Jesuit. Something he would deny. Tuttle mentions one instance when a man shouted out in the middle of one of Wesley’s sermons “Aye, he is a Jesuit; that’s plain.” A Catholic priest responded aloud, “No he is not; I [wish] to God he was.”

Anyways, I’ve learned a great deal from my spiritual director and one thing that has intrigued me—and something I still don’t fully understand—is the Ignatian principle of desire.

Ignatian Desire

When Ignatians talk about desire they are not talking about sexual desire, which ends up being where the term is used most these days. It’s the desire mentioned by Jesus who often says in the Gospels, “I desire mercy not sacrifice.”

Vinita Hampton Wright describes it well, “St. Ignatius believed—and this belief lies at the heart of Ignatian spirituality—that our truest desires reflect God’s desires in us and for us.” This is where this becomes a powerful way to listen to God. If we listen to our desires—the deep longings of our heart—then we might in fact be listening to God. She continues, “The only way to discover our truest desires is to bring ourselves to prayer and spend time with our questions, our hurts and fears, and our dreams. In prayer and over time, we can allow the Holy Spirit to sift through all of it until what remains is what we really long for.”

My spiritual director shared a story from his training that has stuck with me. He said in one class the professor invited the folks in the group to take ten minutes to write out what they wanted from God. When the time was up the professor invited them to take ten more minutes and write out what they really wanted from God. When the time was up the professor invited them to take ten more minutes to write out what they really wanted from God. By the end of that ten minutes they were starting to get somewhere.

I’m not writing today from a position of expertise but as a co-learner. The Ignatians have been listening to God for 500 years, so I pay attention to their suggestions and try to understand them better. So today, consider reflecting on your deep desires. See what God might be saying and where God might be leading you. Perhaps take some time to reflect on what you really want from God.