Thoughts on Desire (& my icon)
Sometimes I make the mistake of visiting old blog posts from five, six year ago. I’m always embarrassed by what I’ve written; you’d think I’d know better by now to just stop blogging to prevent 30-year-old Lauren from blushing and shoving her laptop back in her bag.
But, you know, I can’t do that. Blogs are like painful time capsules. If I ever want to know what I was like in 2014, this is how. (Again, my apologies to 30-year-old Lauren. God help you.)
But today I was looking at posts from December 2009, when I started interacting with the Preemptive Love Coalition, the org I eventually interned with the following summer. I’m (hopefully!) hosting Jeremy and others from PLC this December, and I was curious about my state of mind back then that made me want to move away to Iraq.
I knew at that point in my life I had just been crushed by a crush (damn him and his pie). I knew it was around the time I started questioning everything I believed about Christianity, when I started reading atheist blogs and rewriting creeds. It was when I learned that the magazine I had so wanted to work for was not worth my time or energy.
I wrote a lot about these things in terms of death. I compared my life to that of Ezekiel the prophet’s who was told his wife was going to die, but sry, no tears. I compared it to the Sabbath commands of the Old Testament, to “letting the fields die.”
And I’m reading through these posts and my language is barfably dramatic. Like, why would she believe in a God who is going to come in there and kill her dreams all the time? (And this is exactly what I believed.) But I always had hope that something was going to grow out of that death. (“Every seed must die before it grows.”)
That seems to me, at 24, kind of endearing and hopeful and something I want to stand behind. Because despair is a lot easier response than the courage to hope (shout out to Tillich!).
And the truth is–this is still what I believe, to an extent, but I wouldn’t use all that drab death language anymore.
I rode home with my friend Bethany G. from church a few Sundays ago, after a group of us drank beer and talked about my thesis. We talked about desire and how maybe the Church is too good at teaching us to cut off our desire or be so afraid of it, instead of cultivating it in people. And shouldn’t we believe that our desires are within us for a reason?
I think this is what I was getting at back then, when I was 19 and moody. I had all these desires–to have this certain job after college, to date this certain artsy boy. And those weren’t bad things. But I was invited into desiring more. I was invited to want better for myself.
And so in a way, those specific desires had to die, or at least be channeled differently. My desire to use my writing for the good of the world led me to PLC. My desire to date an artsy boy led me to Nate–and my desire to date and love Nate will hopefully lead me to someone else (you know, someone who wants to be with me too. [I guess the drama hasn’t completely gone away.])
—
As a side project for my thesis, I wrote an icon of an “erotic saint,” a representation of a woman who lives into her desires fully. She wants much for herself, but she’s centered in God.
I’ve thought a lot about who she is a patron saint for. (Me, of course, but who else?) In the spring I brainstormed this list:
This icon is for those women who were told their bodies were bad just because they existed. For the women who were taken advantage of in sex. The raped. The molested. For the men who were sexually harassed but no one would believe them. For the homosexuals who often feel they have to deny their sexuality. For the girls growing into their bodies. For the boys growing into theirs. For those who are so confused by their urges (who they’re toward, what to do about them). For the virgins who are having a hard time not thinking about sex. For the virgins who are glad never to have had sex. For the sexed who feel guilty not just for what they’ve done but for their desire. For the wives who wish they hadn’t waited. For the wives who want more sex than their husbands. For the husbands who want more sex, for the husbands who want to abstain. For the shamed, disappointed, disillusioned. For those who think desire is all about sex. For those who desire more than sex. For those whose bodies are broken. For those who are embarrassed to look in the mirror. For those who have had surgery on their genitals. For those whose gender is different from their sex. For those bodies are marked by their abusers. For those whose bodies are marked by them. For those who love their bodies. For those whose partners love their bodies. For those who see God through sex. For those who find joy in things worth rejoicing over. For those who do not settle. For those who praise God for intimacy. For those who desire much! For those who ought to desire more. For the confused. For the bisexual. For the transgender, transsexual. For the elderly, still desiring sexual intimacy. For the youth signing abstinence pledges. For Tamar. For Rahab. For Mary. For Ruth. For Augustine’s unnamed concubine.
July 31, 2014