Awakening to Wholeness is a series of prompts, reflections, and teachings about how holding the tension of opposites can help us to heal division and experience wholeness. If you feel moved to share your own reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
Desire is a basic human capacity. Alongside thinking, feeling, and sensing, wanting is one of the foundations that anchors human experience. Our wants and desires orient us in the world. They help us to distinguish dangerous from pleasurable, good from not-so-good.
Over time, our wants and desires shape the trajectory of our vocation. Chronic desires become passions, which ideally form into life purpose and contribution to the common good, in response to the needs of the world.
Wants, desires, and passions, in themselves and to the degree they shape our path in life, can be beneficial. At the same time, the spiritual call to surrender suggests that we should let go of our wants and desires. Teachers in the early desert tradition cautioned vigilance towards the passions, which were understood as deep, hidden forces within human capacity that held the potential to derail or consume us.
So, we find another tricky tension in wanting, but not wanting. On the one hand, our wants and desires help us to find ourselves and orient us in the world. On the other hand, maturing spiritual practice, especially in surrender, suggests that we should not want anything other than God and should learn to “let go” of everything that is not God—including ourselves.
Yet in order to let go of a thing, we presume that there was a thing worth grasping in the first place. In other words, I must build up a “self” before I can learn to let go of myself. As is the case with all opposing poles of tensions, there is wisdom to be found in not collapsing the choice into on either-or game (either I find my full self, or I find God).
One nugget of wisdom found in this tension is that finding one’s full self might be most feasible and practical within the larger “container” of the Holy One. Left with my own lens, I might find myself confined to a narrow and shallow container. In widening and deepening my lens, though the practice of surrender, I might just find that my deepest desires are already aligned within the Holy One, through the brute force of Love, to which I offer my consent in the practice of wanting and yet not wanting.
Contemplative Questions
We offer the following questions as prompts to help you reflect on the presence of opposites in your spiritual practice and your life.
- When have your wants or desires shaped your life purpose or helped you contribute to the common good?
- When have your wants or desires derailed or distracted you from your greater purpose?
- How do you hold the tension of these opposites? How has this tension guided or changed you over time?
Join the conversation! If you feel moved to share your reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
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Christine Luna Munger
Christine Luna Munger, PhD currently serves as the director of the Episcopal House of Prayer. She previously served as Coordinator of the Spiritual Direction Certificate and Professor of Theology at St. Catherine University. She regularly writes, teaches, and leads group prayer sits at EHoP.
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