Befriending Our Desires by Philip Sheldrake

Author:Philip Sheldrake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Published: 2016-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Whether we can understand desire as existing even beyond this, in whatever we mean by “eternal life,” is something to which I will return later.

So, it would appear that longing and desire, ours and God’s, are qualities that remain until we are caught into God’s “bliss.” We never possess God or encompass the infinite. For us, in relation to God, there will always be the promise of more, because we cannot experience any limit to what it is we ultimately desire. As one of the great spiritual teachers of the Eastern Church, Gregory of Nyssa, reminds us, communion with God is an experience of continual expansion. In meeting God, we can never be filled in an ultimate sense. Desire, therefore, as openness to possibility and to love ever remains in us. “This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him. But one must always, by looking at what he can see, rekindle his desire to see more” (Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, bk. 2, 239).

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