The Heart’s Upward Longings

God Loves You

Suffering was never the great stumbling block getting in the way of belief for me. Indeed, my life, the lives of those around me, the world itself was superabundantly filled with it both when I was a child and continuing to this day. Stretching back in history and carrying on until the end of time, it is a constant, looming presence. To try doubting or denying Original Sin simply never crossed my mind. I am perhaps hyperaware of my own fallibility, my own frustrating inability to be good. I consider it a blessing, a little operation of grace.

Desire, on the other hand…that’s where the roots and brambles obstruct the path and caused me to trip and stumble. The gnawing needs and appetites I always had, the need for affirmation and encouragement, the need for affection, food, sleep, all conspired to make me burdensome to my mother. Even before puberty, I was already sexual – fascinated by women, drawn to them, mysteriously appreciative of them. Before hormonal changes awakened a physical ache in me, I had already long found them visually alluring.

I revealed my most elemental childhood self at perhaps age 7 or 8 when I burst into a party my parents were hosting long after the time when I should have been in bed. Somehow, I’d discovered the lingerie section of the Sears catalog and I exuberantly bounded into the room with catalog triumphantly held aloft, exclaiming, “Look what I found!” I recall guests laughing and me being escorted out of the room to bed.

Several years later, a rush of hormones unexpectedly began to wash over me, making me feel even more awkward and bashful and fascinated by girls. This coincided roughly coincided with the airing of this gloriously 1980s commercial for Van Heusen shirts:

. My imagination had already been captured several years prior when my parents, sister, and 9 year old me went to the movies and saw “Risky Business” together as a family, but this ad and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition that my mother bought for me for reasons never explained confirmed in me my attraction to and fascination with women (and fashion, incidentally).

Or, at least, images of women. The ones in the ads and magazines, the ones on TV and in music videos and movies were so much different from the self-contained and seemingly undesiring women I knew in real life. The beautiful and unattainable fantasy contrasted wildly with the real-world desire not to desire, not to be a woman’s burdensome regret. By this time, I had already read about Acteon seeing Artemis bathing and getting turned into a stag and torn apart by his own hunting dogs. I had read about Atalanta who managed to avoid marriage by outracing the hapless suitors who were willing to be killed if they lost. I did what I could to keep me safe from my desires, from inflicting myself on girls, to use my mother’s phrase. Despite the occasional suicidal thoughts I had as a reaction to my self-hatred, I never actually harmed myself. I did pretty well, I thought.

Until I didn’t, when I was assaulted. In that episode, the woman of the image, of the fantasy, broke through into the real world, the material world of bodies, of time, of living-room sofas in simple Midwestern houses, the world of hormones and sweat and saliva, of lips and breasts and grasping hands. I was thrilled, desolated, and abandoned all at once. “Ravished,” to use a word that one hears so rarely anymore, which connotes three things: being seized, raped, and filled with delight.

In a moral sense, I saw what happens when I give in to my desires. In a physical and psychological sense, I was at war with myself. To be so violently desired after having felt so undesirable for so long was its own perplexing thrill.

The problem with desire, with eros—the desire for union with someone outside oneself—what I call “the heart’s upward longings,” is that it directly undermines the self-sufficiency I was raised to embrace. It is our response to an awareness of our own finitude. Our inability to meet our own needs makes us painfully and longingly aware of our need for others. In seeing plants, animals, relatives and friends die, we become aware of our own mortality, our own eventual death, and we long to make something or someone who will outlive us, who will memorialize us in our absence.

Eros, then, in this larger sense, emerges from a humility that accepts one’s own limitations, one’s own smallness, and reaches out of that smallness to another. And in this reaching out, we strive to create enduring things, to bring children into the world, to explore with wonderment new areas of knowledge. It is an expression of hope.

Self-sufficiency, the idea that we are meant to meet all of our own needs ourselves, that any need we cannot meet on our own is unnecessary, that our seeking help and support and companionship with others is to make ourselves burdensome, to inflict ourselves on others, is an anti-eros. It is a type of despair and pride, resignation to finitude, to the limitations of death.

Eros, the heart’s upward longing, a force driving one up and beyond earthbound limitation. Death, a ceiling, a horizontal levelling force that equalizes all by returning all to dust.

And so, at last, we arrive at the solution to my problem, the problem of seemingly infinite desire in a world of loss, adversity, and futility.

Eros-Logos-Thanatos, Colin O’Brien, 2013(?)

Whether or not I actually drew this particular diagram when I was living with a community of Trappist monks, the image first came to me during that time in the spring of 2013. The long periods of silence and solitude brought forth things long hidden within me and drew me deeper into intimacy with God in Scripture, in the liturgical prayers of the community, and in a way of life not drastically different from that of the order’s 12^th century forebears.

The image documents an insight into Christ revealed in the Gospel and Letters of John. The Incarnation of Christ is the full revelation of God’s love for us. In Him, we come to see that eros, those upward longings of the heart, is met with His love descending to us at the Incarnation. Our finitude of love for Him is met with His plenitude of love for us, not as the lust of Zeus for mortals, but as a love that unites us to Him for all eternity.

His love for us is revealed in its fullness when He takes on the horizontal levelling force of death for us. Eros and Thanatos, love and death, intersect to form a cross, and at that intersection is Logos, Christ, whose love and death, whose ravishment for our sake undoes limitation, despair, and futility.