LENT WK 6: DESIRE
Lord, You have heard the desire of the humble; You will prepare their heart; You will cause Your ear to hear. Psalm 10:17
Prayer: Lord, give me the grace to grow in interior freedom so that I am able to respond wholeheartedly to your invitation in my life.
Lent is an opportune season to reflect on our desires. More deeply, to ponder the condition of our hearts: paying attention to our attachments, compulsions and desires in the presence of the Holy Spirit. We take time this week to reflect on the areas of our heart that are misaligned and misguided from living in the love of God.
Reflect: How do you come today in the midst of this busy week? What desires have been stirred in you this past week? Take a few minutes of quiet to let one desire raise its hand and come to the surface.
Journal a few phrases or sentences about this desire. Hold it before Jesus.
St. Augustine said that “the entire life…is an exercise of holy desire.” Keep holding your desire as you reflect on this story from the Gospel of Mark.
“And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’
And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.”
And he said to him, 'Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.’
And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, ‘You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’
Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.”
Do you feel the many desires present in this story? The way the man was willing to make a scene by running up to Jesus and kneeling before him. His desire to sincerely know what is good and right. His eager desire to please Jesus by showing him all that he had done to be good enough. Good enough to deserve to be loved, to be given eternal life.
Ignatius in the Exercises guides us to reflect on our desires and attachments by considering three ways of living. He says we can be procrastinators, we can be compromisers or we can be free.
We who find ourselves as procrastinators feel the attachments, desires, and impulses of life and want to let go so we can give our life more wholeheartedly to God’s invitation. And yet, in the clutter of life and the busyness of life we let the invitation to freedom slip away.
Still another way is to compromise. We desire to be free of our attachments and at the same time another part of our heart won’t let go. We do good things, make honorable sacrifices (“all this I have done since my youth”) and yet remain in our disordered and misguided attachments, asking God to bless what we are doing for him.
And then Ignatius describes a third way, a better way, a way toward freedom. To be found in this way is to recognize the attachments we have and desire to be free, yet that itself is not the end goal. Rather we hold our attachments and desires before God longing only what God wills. This is the letting go that only happens in the gaze of Love toward us.
The true desires of the rich young ruler were laid bare in the loving gaze of Jesus. He went away saddened and disheartened for his true desire was for his wealth.
Reflection: Pause for a moment and reflect on your desire you journaled before. Let the loving gaze of Jesus fall upon you.
Ask Jesus to show you what is good about your desire. Ask Jesus to show you where your desire or love is disordered. Ask Jesus for the grace to hold it before him with holy indifference. Ask him for grace in the coming days to know what to embrace and what to let go.
Prayer: O God, grant that we may desire you, and desiring you seek you, and seeking you find you, and finding you be satisfied in you forever. Amen. ~Francis Xavier