Abstract
How we reckon with desire matters greatly because desire is by nature sensitive and personal to each one of us. Desire is also fickle and feels fleeting, residing in a place within us that is so impossibly complex we cannot help but be deceived by the things that dwell therein (Jeremiah 17.9). Sometimes all we can muster is a feigning desire to desire, a want to want to enact the good. So, what do we do with our desires (or lack thereof) for God and the Kingdom? What do we do when our desires seem muted, absent, or fleeting? Have I disappointed God when all I can offer is a heavy sigh or some vain attempt to want God? In the academy, the pastorate, spiritual direction, and friendship (among many other contexts), these questions are not merely academic exercises but represent the real people who we love and serve.
In Desiring to Desire God, David Fagerberg develops a sort of “grammar” of desire as presented by a variety of Catholic spiritual writers from 1500 through roughly 1900, who he refers to collectively as the theologians of abnegation (3). From beginning to end, he parses the topic of desire by setting these authors in conversation with one another, uncovering a surprising coherence in how they view God interacting with - and even welcoming - the most feeble of our desires in the spiritual life (149). He begins the book with a clear trajectory that serves as an anchoring ethos for the rest of his work: “To pray is best; to want to pray is good; to want to want to pray is the first touch by God” (1). As a thematic exploration, this book is “less about what we desire, and more about the state of desiring itself” (9). This is hopeful because, ultimately, “desiring is the first touch of love, and love is the fountainhead of desire” (10).
Structurally, the first four chapters articulate a sort of context for desire, defining desire and weaving together a synthesis of these authors’ voices around how desire works. Chapters five through seven discuss prayer and desire, working out some of the implications of desiring to desire in this important aspect of Christian practice. He then develops a theological lens for desiring to desire, utilizing the classic theological virtues and grace as his loci (chapter eight and nine, respectively). The final two chapters bring the exploration to a conclusion, drawing out the practical advice these authors have to offer for the benefit of those attending to the spiritual life (chapter ten) and naming how the fulfillment of our desires works in and through ours deaths (chapter eleven).
The crux of the work appears early as he wrestles with “desiring to desire” as an independent good in-and-of itself. To want to love is, for Fagerberg and the authors he weaves together, the first movement of the love of God (25). Building on his argument from the previous chapter that “desire is a sign of intention, inclination, affection” (15) and that even this mustard seed-sized desire emerges from a first act of God towards humanity (20), he argues that starting to love (which is to say, to want to love) as better and infinitely more fruitful than not loving at all: “In order to love, start with a desire to love” (27).
Fagerberg highlights the importance of the human will as the functional center of desire. How important, in especially hopeless moments: “So many things are beyond our will and control, but our desire is not one of them. We can always want to want more” (29). This desire may be small, but the authors he interacts with here agree that the size or intensity of the person’s internal desire is not what constitutes ‘enough’; it is the size and power of that desire’s object, namely God, that transfigures the desire to desire into something beautiful, powerful, and significant (28).
Another feature of his work that is worth noting here is his exploration of how these authors deal with intention and action in the third chapter. Quoting from Frederick Faber’s Creator and the Creature, he notes that “if desire is equal to an act, our authors are led to say ‘a voluntary thought and a deliberate desire are not less actions in the sight of God than the words of our mouths or the operations of our hands’” (42). What Fagerberg offers here around this idea, and his clarity is a profound encouragement for those in seasons of struggle: “Desiring to love is love; desiring to pray is prayer; devoutness is piety” (53). In exploring intentionality and action (and entwining them together as inseparable action-leading-to-action), he gives a coherence to his exploration of desire from the previous chapters and frames the remainder of the text. From here he expands on these main points or explores specific areas where these topics intersect with Christian practices.
Fagerberg’s intention in writing Desiring to Desire God was to enter into the words of various theologians and allow them to speak to him and to his readers (3). This is commendable and necessary - to be unaffected by the object of our study in theology seems silly, especially when studying such an important and seemingly universal human experience. The only critique I will offer here is that readers could benefit from more of Fagerberg’s voice. Throughout, I was struck by how important his clarifying and synthesizing remarks were to make sense of the chains of quotations. To this end, I also think readers may have benefitted from an introduction to the background of the theologians of abnegation to set a foundation for those unfamiliar with them. As it stands, though, he does an excellent job in allowing the authors to speak for themselves which is precisely what he set out to do.
The gift that David Fagerberg brings to the readers of this book is clarity. As someone from a Protestant tradition, engaging with some of these writers from the Catholic tradition can feel daunting. He weaves together an accessible introduction with clarity and dynamism, giving those for whom authors like Alphonsus de Liguori, Louis of Blois, or even François Fénelon feel inaccessible a starting place for exploration - a bit of a source book. Additionally, I commend David Fagerberg for wrestling with such an important pastoral topic so articulately and winsomely. What we do with our self-imposed disappointments is of great concern for any of us, especially those who walk alongside others. What he offers in Desiring to Desire God is a starting place for hope for practitioners who walk alongside those in seasons of struggle, disappointment, or navigating loss and academicians who walk alongside students alike. A cloud of witnesses, lent clarity through his incisive insights, attest that even to desire to desire the God who loves us is a sign that God is nearer than we might well imagine.