How appropriate. I was finishing a great new book, Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing, by Christopher West, and the song on my iPod was Miguel’s “Do You.”
Lyrics:
Do you like drugs?
Have you ever felt alone?
Do you still believe in love?
Do you like drugs?
Yeah, me too
The confluence of the words Christopher West was preaching and the ones preached by Miguel, a gifted young soul singer, is worth exploring. West is a brilliant young Catholic apologist. His speciality is the theology of the body, the teaching by Pope John Paul II that explores how our bodies reflect our souls and our desire for union with God.
That desire for union with God is why we crave sex, and why people like Miguel do drugs–or at least talk about it in a song. God is love, a love that is without pain or limitation, and it is built into our hearts to want to be a part of that love. We do all kinds of wonderful things to get a piece of that love: pledge ourselves to another for life, have children, create art. We also do stupid things: drugs, drinking, sex without love. But the end goal is the same, even if we find we find ourselves in hell if we try and get there through chemicals and heartless sex. G. K. Chesterton once said every man who has gone to a house of prostitution has been looking for God.
It can be useful to be blunt about our desires, and that is one of the many things that makes Christopher West’s Fill These Hearts such a great and wise book. West just comes right out and says it: We want sex. We have longings. We ache. He then describes three ways to deal with out our desires: the stoic, the addict, and the mystic. The stoic totally renounces the desires of the flesh–and even the world. For some this is a genuine calling, although it’s important to remember that many religious people who choose a life of solitude actually pray for the world even as they escape it.
After the stoic is the addict. The addict indulges without prudence or wisdom. He knows that the beer he drinks or the sex she has feels great and may even be an indication for the ultimate good he is trying to achieve. But he makes that pleasure an idol. And only God, not idols, can make us complete. Reading and listening to Miguel’s lyrics–“Do you like drugs”–he seems headed for this fate.
Finally there is the mystic. And as West describes it
the mystic is the one who allows himself to feel the deepest depths of human desire and chooses to “stay in the pain” of wanting more than this life has to offer. Having walked through many purifying trials (what the mystical tradition of the [Catholic] Church calls “dark nights”), he is able to both do without the many pleasures of this world and to rejoice in all of the true pleasures of this world without idolizing them–that is, without trying to suck infinity out of them. . . . For the mystic, the true pleasures of the world are a welcome but only dim foreshadowing of the ecstasy that awaits him in the world to come.
Fill These Hearts is a wonderful and profound book.
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