Young Catholic Professionals, San Antonio
Advent Retreat
Reflection
Video
Listening to the reflection, when the time comes, watch This video and come back
Recommended Spiritual Reading for Advent
- Abandonment to Divine Providence (or Sacrament of the Present Moment), Jean-Pierre de Caussade, transl. John Beevers, Link
- Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart, Dr. Greg K. Popcak Ph.D., Link
Further Reading
- The Radiance in Your Eyes, Julian Carron, Link
- Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, Erik Varden, Link
- Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI, Link
Texts for Discussion
So, is desire a defect to be corrected? In the face of its limitlessness, its excess, the fact that it never lets us be, it seems that from the ancient Greeks onwards, the one strategy employed has been to diminish it. But this more or less fierce struggle to confine it within acceptable limits is the most evident confirmation of its structural boundlessness, of its disturbing exorbitance. The failure of all attempts to bridle desire by imposing limits and rules shows just how irreducible it is; it demonstrates that deep down in our being, the Augustinian cor inquietum lives on.
C.S. Lewis had Screwtape articulate the concept that “the deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which the enemy [God] has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human’s own real likings and dislikings.” This is the diabolical tactic: to distance us from our deepest impulses, from the desires that constitute us, distracting us.
– Radiance in Your Eyes
“What is it you want—those of you seeking perfection? Give your desires free reign, setting absolutely no limits, no boundaries to them. Listen to me: let your hearts demand the infinite, for I can tell you how to fill them. There is never one moment in which I cannot show you how to find whatever you can desire. The present moment is always overflowing with immeasurable riches, far more than you are able to hold. Your faith will measure it out to you: as you believe, so you will receive. Love, too, is also a measure. The more you love the more you will want and the more you will get. Every moment the will of God is stretched out before us like a vast ocean which the desires of our hearts can never empty, but more and more of it will be ours as our souls grow in faith, in trust and in love. The entire universe cannot fill and sustain our hearts, for they are greater than all apart from God” (41).
– Abandonment to Divine Providence
But is this the case? Did Christianity really destroy eros? Let us take a look at the pre- Christian world. The Greeks—not unlike other cultures—considered eros principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a “divine madness” which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness. […] In the religions, this attitude found expression in fertility cults, part of which was the “sacred” prostitution which flourished in many temples. Eros was thus celebrated as divine power, as fellowship with the Divine.
The Old Testament firmly opposed this form of religion, which represents a powerful temptation against monotheistic faith, combating it as a perversion of religiosity. But it in no way rejected eros as such; rather, it declared war on a warped and destructive form of it, because this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it. Indeed, the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing “divine madness”: far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited. An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in “ecstasy” towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man. Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.
– Deus Cáritas Est
