Not all desires are created equal. The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, noted that before his conversion he felt that he was starting to lose possession of his soul and his freedom. The secular culture, that he had been formed in, had been feeding him on a steady diet of ‘thin’ desires like success, wealth, and prestige.
Merton wrote, “The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.” Merton found that these ‘thin’ desires did not have the tensile and compressive strength to function as load bearing walls in the structure of his life. He was always facing the fear of the fragility of his being. The Holy Spirit awakened the desire in him to find the ‘thick’ desires that had the structural strength to function as the mainstays of his life. King David had the same passion, “Delight in the Lord and he will give you the [thick] desires of your heart”, Psalm 37:4.
Jesus talks about ‘thick’ desires, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.” -Matthew 13:44. The ultimate ‘thick’ desire the ‘pearl of great price’ is hidden in plain sight but the site on which it is hidden requires the overburden of, as Merton notes, “the trivial, the sordid and the evanescent” to be removed. ‘Thin’ desires are easily discovered, they dwell on the surface and can actually be part of the overburden that needs to be removed from our lives in order to discover the treasure that lies hidden beneath. In this sense, we need to get our spiritual hands dirty and work out our salvation by doing some excavating on the ground of our being.
There is an ongoing tension between the ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ desires that we are subject to. ‘Thin’ desires have better PR and a whole advertising infrastructure behind them. ‘Thin’ desires can even dress up in the clothing of ‘thick’ desires to try and deceive us. So, while journeying through the land of devious desires we need to heed Jesus’ instructions to, “be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.”
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