THE GENTLE SIN
by Galen Guengerich
February 16, 2003
Over the past several months, tens of thousands of military men and women have faced, often for the first time, the harsh reality that going to war means leaving home and family behind. Alongside ships and transport planes, tears of farewell have been the rule of the day. In one scene depicted by The New York Times, Petty Officer Mike Axelsen said goodbye to his wife, Petty Officer Patricia Axelsen, at the Navy’s base in San Diego. They held each other close under the flag on the stern of the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship which carries 2,074 troops and a crew of 1,077. As mommy prepared to head off to war, daddy sat with their two-year-old child, Tristan, whose eyes were red from crying and whose fists were buried deep in his cheeks. Mike Axelsen shrugged and tried to laugh. "Mr. Mom," he said. "The modern military." Patricia Axelsen stared out at the ocean and said: "I don't want to go. But I have to. I hope I'll be back soon."
Ironically, the prospect of scenes like this led to the tradition of Valentine’s Day. The third century of the Common Era was a time of considerable strife and political upheaval in the Roman Empire. Because of the turmoil, the Roman Emperor Claudius II (also known as Claudius the Cruel) found himself with a pressing need for an especially fierce army. He sought men who were eager to leave home and lusty for battle. Concluding that happily married men would make indifferent soldiers at best, Claudius decreed that no one in the realm could be engaged or married. Despite the decree, a sympathetic Italian bishop named Valentine persisted in performing clandestine marriages for his young parishioners. When Claudius discovered Valentine's secret nuptials, the Emperor had the Bishop clubbed to death and beheaded on February 14 in the year 270.
Over the centuries, the focus of Valentine’s Day has shifted from commemorating the monstrous crime committed by Claudius against Bishop Valentine to celebrating what Shakespeare termed, in Romeo and Juliet, the gentle sin–the sin of desire. Near the end of the first act of the play, Romeo catches sight of Juliet at a dance in the home of her father Capulet. Romeo asks one of the servants, "What lady is that, which doth enrich the hand of yonder knight?" The servant replies, "I know not, sir." Romeo responds, "O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" He waits for the music to end and says,
The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand,
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.Shortly thereafter, Romeo and Juliet, their identities still unknown to each other, engage in a courtly conversation about lips, which saints pray with and sinners kiss with. After Romeo leaves the dance, Juliet inquires about his identity, saying to her nurse, "Go ask his name: if he be married, my grave is like to be my wedding bed." The nurse responds with the news that he is worse than married: "His name is Romeo and a Montague; the only son of your great enemy." Juliet responds:
My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me,
That I must love a loathed enemy.In the end, of course, the gentle sin of Romeo and Juliet turns out not to be gentle at all; their desire for each other ultimately costs them their lives. They longed for something they did not have. This is the nature of desire–to long for what is missing, what is absent, what is not there.
Philosophers have long differentiated desire from love on precisely this point. The 17th-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggests in his book Leviathan that the absence of the desired object is the defining characteristic that distinguishes desire from love. "Desire and love are the same thing;" he says, "Save that by desire, we always signify the absence of the object; by love, most commonly the presence of the same." Western thinkers have also viewed desire as fundamental to human life. To be human is to desire what we do not have. Desire motivates us in many important ways: physical desire, for example, is called hunger or thirst, intellectual desire is called curiosity, sexual desire is called lust, economic desire is called consumer demand. Remove these expressions of desire, and human life as we know it would cease to exist. Our culture in general and our economy in particular are built on our desire for things and experiences we do not have.
Does this mean that desire is a good thing? The Christian tradition takes a dim view of desire, mainly because it tends to focus on the ephemeral satisfactions of this world–variously termed the lust of the flesh or the pride of the eye–rather than the eternal rewards of the next world. In the April 1872 issue of Atlantic Monthly, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a long, narrative poem titled "The Brewing of Soma." It describes Vedic priests going into the forest and drinking themselves into a stupor with a concoction called soma, which supposedly would enable them to have a religious experience and contact the spirit world. After describing the scene of revelry and debauchery, Whittier presses home his lesson about repentance and restraint with words that have subsequently become a well-known hymn. A modified version of it even appears in our hymnal. In the original setting, the poem’s final stanzas include these lines:
Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways;
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives Thy service find,
In deeper reverence, praise.Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.Breathe through the heat of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.I must confess that I like Whittier’s poem a lot, and there are days when dews of quietness sound appealing, especially if they come with a beach umbrella and a good book. All of us have moments when we wish someone would take the strain and stress from our souls, and let our orderly lives display the beauty of divine peace. Nonetheless, I think Whittier is wrong to suggest that we are fulfilled as human beings only when all our desires and strivings cease. To be human is to be driven by desire.
In fact, the fifteenth-century Indian mystic Kabir, a poet and philosopher who today is revered by both Hindus and Muslims, argues that desire constitutes the true wealth of humanity. One of the leading contemporary interpreters of Kabir is a former Fulbright scholar named Eknath Easwaran, who explains that Kabir views desire as having four stages. The vast majority of people, he says, are born with countless desires–too many desires to pursue any one of them with conviction or dedication. Most of these countless desires concern the superficial aspects of life, such as personal appearance or personal possessions. People who have many desires are the poorest of people, Kabir says, and they seldom achieve any success in any field. Their lives are also the saddest, because they are the most superficial, dominated by too many desires that matter too little.
There are other people, Kabir goes on to say, who are born with some desires, and these are usually people who lead what are considered successful lives. No matter what field of endeavor they choose, they manage to accomplish at least modest goals, because they are able to focus on only some desires.
A fortunate few individuals, however, have only a few desires. Out of these come the geniuses: great scientists like Madame Curie and Albert Einstein, great musicians and poets, great humanitarians and political leaders. These individuals have very few desires, and thus they will make their mark in whatever fields they commit themselves to.
Finally, a rare few individuals have only one desire. These are the great mystics–spiritual leaders who often practice meditation, which is a demanding discipline designed to reduce the number of desires. Over time, says Kabir, meditation can reduce a person’s desires from countless to many; then from many to some; from some to a few; and from a few to only one. As the number of desires becomes fewer, the desires themselves become less superficial and more profound.
Kabir also describes a pattern of emotional development that corresponds with the decrease in the number of desires. People who have many desires, he says, often have volatile emotional lives. Their emotions go up; they come down. They get upset easily; they calm down quickly. None of these emotional conditions lasts very long, however; one of the great advantages of being superficial is that you are never upset very long because the things that upset you aren’t important. But neither are your satisfactions important or enduring. Nothing lasts long, because nothing matters much.
People whose desires are few, in contrast, have passion. Whatever field of life they commit themselves to, they have a tremendous passion to persevere and to succeed. Driven by a longing that is spread among only a few desires, passionate people often achieve great things. The final step in the emotional progression occurs when all of a person’s passions–personal ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, the need for prestige, the preoccupation with profit–become melded into one flaming passion that sears the heart. Kabir calls this singular passion devotion. In the mystical tradition, devotion leads to the discovery of the self. Simply put, as we move from having countless desires, to having many, to having few, to having one, and as we move from emotion to passion to devotion, we discover who we really are, and what really matters to us.
It is obviously too late for us to try this now, but I wonder what would have happened if we had begun this morning by each of us making a list of everything we want. If you are like me, your list would probably have been rather long. Most of us have many desires. My guess is that Kabir would respond by telling us to start crossing the superficial desires off the list, until we reach the few about which we can be passionate. Then cross off several more until only one remains–the one desire to which we can be wholly devoted.
One means of paring down the list, as Kabir noted, is meditation. Another is adversity, known in the mystical tradition as suffering. When life becomes difficult and uncertain, superficial desires fall away, and what remains is what really matters to us. People who have experienced extreme hardship–soldiers in combat, women living under oppressive regimes, prisoners of conscience, slaves, victims of torture–all report more or less the same thing about the consequences of suffering. When life itself is uncertain, only one thing matters: survival. Life becomes exceedingly simple, its purpose crystal clear. The many desires of life are purified by the fires of adversity; what remains is the one thing that both demands and deserves complete devotion.
To a lesser degree, our own desires have been similarly purified in recent weeks and months by the adversities present in our nation and our world. What was initially a volatile emotional response on our part has become a passionate commitment to certain goals in which we believe deeply. Some individuals have focused their passions even further, devoting themselves to a singular passion in which they discover anew who they are. We will not all share the same passions, of course, nor will we all devote our lives to the same purpose. Even so, my hope is that these fires of adversity will purify and focus the desires of each one of us. We begin by asking what it is that we want. Then we ask which of these things we can be passionate about. Finally, we ask to what can we wholly devote ourselves, even our lives.
The lessons we learn from Kabir can obviously be applied to the challenge of dealing with Iraq. But any stand or action we take as individuals, whether today or in the weeks ahead, must be in service of a larger commitment, a more enduring devotion. The issues of this day are both momentous and complex, but they too shall pass, only to be replaced by other days filled with other challenges. What will endure is our passion and, most of all, our devotion. In the end, the process of self-discovery begins with a very simple question: what do you want?