Desire’s True Light

Desire is a  mysterious thing. It’s an awesome thing, and a terrible thing. It’s sometimes profound, and sometimes profoundly banal. It can be at different times divine or demonic, a beautiful thing or an ugly thing.

But what kind of ‘thing’ can have so many different manifestations?

Not ‘thing’. Desire. Sexual desire to be exact.

Sexual desire can propel us upward, or it can pull us down. When it ascends to heaven it is good and holy and fulfilling, but when it drags us down it is degrading and leads to a fall.

This fall can be called many things: lust, concupiscence, disordered desire. But when desire aims for its true target, the result is unity. This unity is a moral unity, the ‘oneness’ sought by love. It’s objective, suggestive, and bonding.

It’s difficult to describe these two different qualities of desire, it’s like peering into mist. And the dark side of desire is just as mysterious as the holy side. All we can do is grope for metaphors that might shed light on the mystery. And this is where C.S. Lewis can help us.

In his ‘Meditation in a Toolshed’, Lewis describes an experience that became for him (and us) a very powerful metaphor. He says:

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The
sun was shining outside and through the crack at
the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From
where I stood that beam of light, with the specks
of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in
the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black.
I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my
eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture
vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no
beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny
at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the
branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd
million miles away, the sun.

Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

Very different experiences indeed. For Lewis, looking at the beam and looking along the beam were metaphors for two very different ways of perceiving reality. But it also works as a metaphor describing these two very different types of desire.

How you look determines what you see
Although you can sometimes look at a beam of light, light is usually not itself the object of sight, but that through which we see anything at all. That beam of light that Lewis saw as an object was hiding more than it was revealing. So long as Lewis was looking at the beam, Lewis’s vision was confined to the dark shed. This is because to look at a beam of light is to stand outside of that light. You have to keep the beam a certain distance from you in order to objectify it.

But when Lewis looked along the beam, when he allowed his eye to participate in the light of the beam, his vision was transported out of the dark shed and he could see the green leaves outside. When he looked along the beam, it was no longer an object that he was standing before, but a source of illumination, transporting his vision out of the dark shed.

You can look at a beam, or you can look along a beam, but you can’t do both.

Two different experiences of desire
Sex is like that beam of light. You can look at sex. You can objectify sex, and you can objectify another person. But to do so requires putting yourself outside of the light which sex was meant to give off. And to objectify sex or another person necessarily requires keeping them ‘at arms length’. They can become objects of our desire, but they will never reveal their secret. Objectified, sex does not illuminate the eyes of our spirit.

But sexual desire has an illuminating power as well. Like looking along the beam, we must step into it to let it illuminate our eyes and reveal what is at the end of the beam. We must participate in its revelatory power. No longer an object, sex can illuminate and reveal the other person, who is no longer a something to look at, but a someone to share with.

That’s the difference between love and lust.

Lust is standing before sex as an object of desire. Love is standing before a person that we desire to love.

Lust seeks sex. But sex naturally seeks love. What does that mean?

Sex was not meant to be looked at. It was not made to be an object of sight. When you look along the beam, everything that is not illuminated by the light should vanish. The dark shed and the beam of light itself should disappear as the beam does was it was made to do and reveal what is in it, and what is at the end of it.

Sex is not an object but a medium for communion between a man and a woman and God. It was meant to reveal, it was meant to tie and to bind. It is that through which we can become ‘one flesh’ in that unity of love that is only possible for a man and a woman.

Aiming for desire’s true target
Deep down, we long for participation, we really want to look along the beam of sex, but we are often seduced into looking at the beam of lust instead. Love and lust are two very different experiences.

In the dark shed of our fallen nature, the beam of lust can seem the most striking thing in the place. But the shiny specks floating within are just dust.

Only by looking along the beam of love do we see past the dark shed to the light and life outside. We were not made to look at the beam, we were meant to see the green leaves outside, and millions of miles away, the Sun.