Oh God, Take my lips and speak through them, take our minds and think through them, take our hearts and set them on fire with your love. Amen.

When I spoke to you, a couple of weeks back, on Trinity Sunday, I pointed out that in the biblical story of creation, human beings are created, first of all, as hungry creatures.

I suggested that when humankind was created in Paradise, they were created — in order to eat.

But that eating was not primarily about satisfying a bodily need. Instead, it was about entering into communion with God.

Human beings are hungry, because in Paradise man and woman are created as guests of the divine Creator. In Paradise God is a host who has spread out an enormous feast and invited humanity to partake. “See,” God says, “I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.”

In Creation, Divine love is made known to humanity in food.
In Paradise eating is a form of relationship with God.
Eating is communion.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good.”

***

Today’s texts invite us into a further exploration of this theme of hunger.
But this time I will spare you the detailed description of a meal that I’ve eaten. Instead, I want to explore another dimension of human hunger.
I want to see what remains, in this life, of our original hunger for communion with God.
For we are a people who no longer live in Paradise.
A people who sojourn in the world.
But a people still hungry.

In this life I believe that our hunger for communion manifests itself as desire.
A desire we should attend to and even encourage.
A desire that finds its origin and its end in God.
My word for you today is this: Do not give up on your desire!
For it is in and through desire that we can recognize God as Lover and ourselves as the beloved of God.

***
To understand what I mean by desire, it may help to think of it in relation to hunger.

We hunger when our stomachs become empty. We hunger because our bodies compel us — with a sometimes overwhelming force — to eat.
(Depending upon how big your breakfast was, you may be experiencing something of this force right now.)

You see, desire functions in the same way as huger. We desire because of a lack or an emptiness within us that we feel somehow compelled to fill — sometimes despite our best intentions.
Sometimes our desire overwhelms us.
Sometimes our desire even causes us to do what we don’t really want to do.

No one articulates this dimension of desire quite as pointedly as St Paul does in today’s epistle:
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

That is because there is a difference between desire and want. Desire is a force that precedes and conditions our wants. It grows out of our hunger for communion. And, unlike desire, a want can be satisfied:

I may want a doughnut, or a martini, or a new car — and a doughnut, a martini, or a new car might actually bring some mount of satisfaction in each case.

Desire, on the other hand, is not so easily fulfilled. Desire continues to desire, beyond and often despite what we want.

***

This means that desire can sometimes be unwieldy.
It can sometimes even be dangerous.
But the problem does not lie with desire itself — for desire itself is good.
The absence that animates desire is precisely the absence of an intimate and constant communion with God. Without such an intimate and constant communion, our hearts be rest-less — and desire will compel us.
Our hearts are restless because they have not found their rest in God, as St. Augustine puts it.
And it is precisely this rest that Jesus holds out to us in today’s Gospel reading:

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Only then, only in the rest of God, does desire find its fulfillment.
Our wants are but spiritless substitutes for Divine Communion.
It is God, and [God] alone, who can fully satisfy the hunger and longing of our spirit .
says the mystical tradition.
[says the anonymous author of the famous mystical work called The Cloud of Unknowing.]

Desire will never be content with substitutes. Desire will not settle for anything less than God. We might even say that desire can serve as a force against idolatry.
Don’t give up on your desire!

***

Human beings are hungry creatures. We hunger for food because in food there is a remnant of Paradise, and a memory of communion. In truth all hunger is hunger for communion with our Creator. We desire because we long to fill an emptiness in ourselves. We desire because we were created for communion with God.

Don’t give up on your desire, because all desire is desire for God.
Not only is desire a reminder that we have not yet recovered that original communion, that we have not yet found our rest in God. That no idol will substitute for God…

Desire is also an authentic way toward communion with God. For, desire — when it is disciplined, oriented, and transformed by grace — becomes love.

And God, as the mystical writers tell us — God whom neither men nor angels can grasp by knowledge can be embraced by love.

God is portrayed in many ways in the Bible: as King, as Lord, as Father,… but God is also portrayed as Lover.

“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

Our tradition has not been afraid to place these words of the Lover from the Song of Songs in the mouth of God.

The 12th Century French Abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps more than any other, has taught us to hear in the words of the Lover, the beckoning of God.
God the Lover does not cease to be Lord or Father, says Bernard,
For “…it is necessary that God be feared as Lord, honoured as Father,” so that he may be loved as Spouse.”

but the greatest of these is love …
The God who deserves honour, who deserves admiration and marvelling, says Bernard, nonetheless loves much more to be — loved.

Don’t give up on your desire, because all desire is desire for God.
And desire transformed by grace becomes love.
And we, when we are transformed by grace, can recognize ourselves as the Beloved of God — as desired by God.
Thus, We can hear in the words of the Lover to his Beloved, the beckoning of God to us:
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Don’t give up on your desire because all desire is desire for God.

***
But there is yet another reason not to give up on your desire— because desire will not give up on you.

Today’s reading from the Song of Songs, drenched as it is in the sensuous language of desire, seems a far cry from the orchestrated, managed, and patriarchal arrangement of Isaac and Rebekah’s marriage.
These two (quote/unquote) “lovers” would seem to have sacrificed desire in the interest of a political allegiance.
And wouldn’t the surrendering of desire to such calculation be an example of giving up on one’s desire? 
 One would certainly think so.
But what I find interesting is that even here desire cannot but appear — In this story there erupts a desire that surprises and overtakes;
We might say that it is a desire that emerges by grace.

For, when Rebekah sees Isaac for the first time — after having agreed to marry him — she is, it would seem, overcome by desire. She is overcome to the point of falling off of her camel.

Desire can be transformed through prayer, through practice, and through grace — but desire cannot be overcome.
For, the very moment when you imagine desire not to be at work, desire will surprise you.
Desire unattended can drive you into the pauline conundrum of wanting one thing and doing another.
But desire transformed by prayer, practice, and grace can become that which draws you to God.

So let us not loose sight of our desire, our hunger for communion. Let us attend to our God-given restlessness. Let us be transformed that we might know ourselves to be the Beloved of God.
Do not give up on your desire. Instead, allow yourself to hear, in the voice of the Lover, the beckoning of God to you.
— Arise, my Love, my fair one, and come away.
Amen.