the gift of being looked at by God

.... Christians often say that human beings are disposed to configure
appetite in a God-directed way, but we are, in fact, no more disposed
to configure our desires that way than any other. This is, in part,
why it is improper to speak of our desire for God as natural to us.
That desire is just one configuration possible for us; it is no more
natural to us than its opposite, which is a desire for the lack that
is God’s absence. The cultivation of the desire for God, then, is not
a human work independent of God; it is an instance of responsive
gratitude to the gift of the very possibility of action.

An interesting question is whether this openness—this inchoateness of
desire, this readiness for formation and malformation—is a good thing
or a bad thing about us. Is this feature of human existence after the
Fall something to be lamented and corrected, or are there features of
it that warrant rejoicing—features that make it possible for us to be
more fully conformed to God?

In Eden, before the Fall, human desires were not inchoately open in
the way they are now. Adam and Eve’s desires were focused on God
without need for catechesis, and the desire for God was as natural to
them as a heartbeat. An inevitable concomitant of this natural focus,
however, would have been a reduction in the range of desire’s texture
and possible formation. There would have been neither need nor
occasion for the range of gastronomic, verbal, or sexual appetites
that are unavoidably open to us now.

The same is true in heaven. The saints’ natural desires are
indefectibly fixed on God, formed in the single and maximally
beautiful shape of praise. Desire’s heavenly range is, therefore, in
one sense, very small: tightly aimed at a single focus. But because
the Lord is in every sense infinite, desire’s removal from the open
range of possibility that exists here below is not, in fact, a
derangement in the direction of loss but, rather, a focus in the
direction of infinite gain.

Like Adam and Eve, the saints in heaven have a natural desire for God,
but the grammar of the faith requires us to say that there is,
nevertheless, a deep difference between Edenic desire and heavenly
desire. The difference is not of range but of history — a history that
has intervened between paradise and heaven; a ­history of sin and
death, violence and blood; a history in which we are fully implicated.

The absence of tears in heaven — an absence for which there is deep
scriptural warrant—does not mean that this history has been erased or
forgotten. The weight of it remains because the events that constitute
it are real; it is not a shadow play that can be erased by heaven’s
radiance. Those who love God in heaven are healed sinners; they
include killers and rapists and torturers. Those who dwelled in the
paradise at the beginning had not yet sinned and were not yet soaked
in blood violently shed.

God’s embrace of each kind of lover is, therefore, correspondingly
different. If it is true that there is more heavenly rejoicing over
the lost sheep that is found than over the sheep that have not
strayed, God’s embrace shows one important sense in which the history
that began with the eating of forbidden fruit in the Garden and that
will end in the heavenly city is a good one. God’s embrace of each
kind of lover is a way of explaining Adam’s sin, and the consequent
removal from us of a natural desire for God, as a felix culpa, a happy
fault. To say this neither explains nor justifies sin and death. It
simply indicates one thing that follows from the Fall’s derangements
that should not be lamented but, rather, rejoiced in.

The derangement of human desire in the Garden opened human desire to
an infinite range of possibility by making that desire inchoate. The
secondary derangements I have described catechize this inchoateness
into a vast variety of particular configurations. Each of these
particular configurations is, to some extent, damaged, blood- and
violence-threaded, idolatrous, lured by lack and absence.

But not every particular configuration is deranged to the same extent.
My desire to sing the Sanctus and to receive the body and blood of
Christ in humility, in the company of my brothers and sisters in
Christ, is not, in these respects, on a par with my desire to dominate
by intellectual violence my brothers and sisters in the university.
I’ve been catechized into both desires, and both are alive and active
in me, but one conforms me more closely to God, and the other damages
me by separating me from God.

Catechized, secondarily deranged desires are, then, theoretically
locatable in a hierarchy of goodness, although never easily and never
without qualification and ambiguity. Among the products of desire
deranged are some goods that otherwise would not have been. Consider
the singing of a Bach cantata, or the flying buttresses of a Gothic
cathedral, or the poetry of George Herbert, or the embrace of lovers
long separated, or the gift of time and love to the dying, or the
Christian assembly on its knees as bread and wine are consecrated on
the altar. All of these fit with desires well catechized and divinely
beautiful, and all of them would not have occurred without the Fall.

Such goods will, in some fashion, be taken up into heaven. Their
beauty and complexity and order is the reason our theological
rejection of the ordinary concept of natural desire is a lament linked
with joy.

Catholic theologians and Thomistic philosophers will object to this
understanding of the human situation, and their objections must be
taken seriously. But consider this: Among the strongest currents of
thought these days is one that encourages us to discover who we are
and to act accordingly—to gaze with the inward eye on our glassy
essence and respond to what we find there. That gaze yields a vast
range of identities: of gender and sex and ethnicity, of trait and
temperament and passion. If what I have argued is right, when we
attempt to discover who we are in that way, we find only
phantasms — creatures of the imagination that wither when we turn our
imaginations away from them.

This rejection of the language of natural desire opens to us, instead,
the truth that we are creatures — inchoate, unformed, and hovering over
the void from which we were made — who must seek either to return to
that void or to find happiness in the arms of the one who brought us
forth from it. There is no glassy essence to discover; there is
nothing but an unformed gaze that receives form only by looking away
from itself and receiving the gift of being looked at by God.

- Paul J. Griffiths, from The Nature of Desire