Desire Is Not the Enemy

Desire rarely announces itself gently.

It rises as a restlessness in the heart, a longing that refuses to stay quiet. And when it becomes strong—bodily, insistent—we grow uneasy. We assume something has gone wrong. Holiness, we tell ourselves, must mean wanting less.

So we learn to distrust desire.

We suppress it, manage it, or rush to silence it before it exposes something too deep. Yet desire did not begin as a problem. It was placed in us at creation—a thirst meant to draw us toward communion.

Desire is not a command to be obeyed, but a movement to be understood.

The trouble is not that desire is strong, but that it is poorly interpreted. We live in a world that treats desire like an emergency: feel it, satisfy it, immediately. Waiting is called repression. Patience is mistaken for weakness.

But the body does not speak in demands; it speaks in signals. And signals ask for discernment, not impulse.

Desire always reaches before it grabs. It seeks closeness, belonging, union. That is why it cannot be satisfied by consumption. What we consume disappears. Desire, however, wants to remain. It longs for communion, not relief.

When we feed desire with substitutes—images, fantasies, shortcuts to pleasure—we may quiet it for a moment, but we train it to expect less than it was made for. Over time, desire does not fade; it fractures. And the soul grows tired of being fed by things that cannot love it back.

Yet desire itself remains innocent.

Even in temptation, it tells the truth: I was made for more.

Holiness, then, is not the absence of desire, but its conversion. To thank God for desire—even when it feels dangerous—is to trust that He does not place longing in the human heart without purpose.

Desire is not the enemy.
The lies we attach to it are.

If we listen carefully, desire will not lead us away from God.
It will lead us—slowly, patiently—home.