Disagreeing Desires

What’s going on inside me? Why so many mixed-motives and competing emotions?

Over the years I’ve discovered two places inside me, a shallow place that doesn’t care about short term discomfort or long-term weight gain. And another place, a deeper place that wants to stop eating but rarely wins. The shallow place is more dominant and aggressive but the deeper place is more genuine and gentle, more me, I think – I hope. St. Paul saw it all long ago, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate (Rom 7:15).”

And this was one of the first things I recognized when entering the Purgative way. In so many situations — not just with food — I knew what I wanted to do, but I rarely did it. I felt bombarded by disagreeing desires, I still do, I live with a steady friction between my longing and my living.

Here again, Dallas Willard pointed the way: “the primary source of our entanglement is our desires — not just our desires themselves, but our enslavement to them and confusion about them.”

Yes. That was it. Nothing was inherently wrong with desire itself, it was my confusion and enslavement to it that was causing the problem. When I intentionally began journeying across the Purgative way, I assumed desire itself was the problem. I remember thinking over-and-over: what’s going on inside me? Why so many mixed-motives and competing emotions?

How do I get rid of desire?

It wouldn’t be until much later that I discovered the goal of training transformation was not to rid myself of desire, but to desire differently. The more conscious I became of this, the more the fog began to lift. Releasing this false belief was a necessary purging, a perfect example of what happens on the Purgative path.

But this newfound awareness didn’t totally transform my appetite, but it did help me see desire for what it is, wounded but wonderful — a good created by God — the inner terrain of my transformation.

There is still much work to do.

Journeying across the Threefold Way is not about achieving a couple of spectacular transformations, rather it’s about receiving a million miniature ones, tiny transformations that slowly, but surely, reorder all of my disordered desires.