Thy Heart's Desire

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, MA
Sunday May 7th, 2006

OPENING WORDS: “This is the mission of our faith: to teach the fragile art of hospitality; to revere both the critical mind and the generous heart; to prove that diversity need not mean divisiveness; and to witness to all that we must hold the whole world in our hands”

-- William F. Schulz


A stingy old miser who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness was determined to prove wrong the saying, "You can't take it with you." After much thought and consideration, he finally figured out a scheme to take at least some of his assets with him when he died.

He instructed his wife to go to the bank and withdraw enough money to fill two large pillowcases. He then directed her to take the bags of money up to the attic and leave them directly above his bed. His plan was that when he passed away, he would reach out and grab the bags as he ascended into heaven.

Several weeks after the funeral, the deceased man’s wife went up into the attic to clean. Coming upon the two forgotten pillowcases stuffed with cash she sadly shook her head and exclaimed, "Oh, that darned old fool. I knew he should have had me put the money in the basement."

I thought I’d start out this morning by asking you all a question, which you don’t really need to try to answer right away. But how do you suppose you would live your lives differently, if money were no object? It’s a trick question, I know. On some level money is always an object; in fact, often it seems like it’s the only object of just about everything we do, and that the more of it one gets, the trickier it becomes simply dealing with the hassles of trying to keep track of it all.

But the question is tricky in another way as well. The underlying assumption of questions like this always seems to be the fantasy of unlimited material wealth: that you would somehow miraculously have all the money you could ever want or need, and never need to worry about it again. But suppose you asked the question literally instead? Suppose there simply was no object in the world that could be thought of as “money” -- that it simply didn’t exist, because there simply wasn’t any need for it.

Is this really any more far fetched than the dream of having so much money that you never have to worry about it again? Nothing to sell or buy, because anything you could possibly ever want or need was freely available, kind of like in Star Trek, or perhaps the Garden of Eden. If you were hungry, you would just go to the replicator unit and order whatever it was you wanted to eat (or in the alternative, perhaps just pluck a piece of fruit from the nearest tree. No, no, not THAT tree. The other tree...). And the same with your clothing, your transportation, your shelter from the elements, and whatever else you might dream of wanting or needing or having. Because the real question that interests me is this: If you didn’t have to worry about earning a living, how would you choose to spend your life?

Of course, this exercise may all just seem like a lot of idle daydreaming to many of you. But personally I think it’s important to ask ourselves these kinds of questions every once in awhile, for a couple of reasons. The first is that, as we sort through the long list of things we can imagine ourselves doing if money were no object, we begin to realize that there are lots of other limitations in life that prevent us from simply having or doing whatever it is that pops into our heads at any given moment. Think about it. Even if you could in theory “have it all,” you probably wouldn’t want to have it all at once.

So if we ask ourselves the question properly, it can help us to focus in more clearly on the things we truly value, whatever those may be. And at the same time, questions like these can also help to prevent us from squandering our time, our money, and our precious lives on things that don’t really matter to us at all -- the “shiny objects” that are more diversion than they are worth, and distract us from our heart’s desire.

I chose this topic, and its companion for next Sunday, because I had the desire to read a book. It’s a desire I get quite often, actually -- I see a review, or hear an interview with an author on the radio, about a topic of profound interest (or perhaps passing curiosity) to me; and the next thing I know I’m on-line at Amazon ordering a copy, which arrives in the mail in a week or so (which is the closest thing to a Star Trek replicator in MY limited experience). Obviously I can’t afford to buy every book I desire to read, and I don’t really even have the time to read everybook I buy...so they tend to pile up in rather tall stacks around the parsonage until I find (or make) the time to open them, or at least find a place for them on my already crowded bookshelves. “We do not choose our obsessions; our obsessions choose us.” I think I read that somewhere once....

This particular book [William B. Irvine’s On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)] had been sitting on my nightstand for about four months, and I wanted to read it because I thought it might help me better understand the process which had brought it (and so many others like it) into my life in the first place. My desire to own every book I find interesting (and my fantasy of someday reading every book I own) is grounded in a more fundamental desire to be smarter than I really am, which in turn is based on my desire to become a better minister, which I suppose in turn is based on a desire to be liked and respected and admired by all of you to whom I minister, and who contribute the money that pays my salary and allows me to buy all these books in the first place. And at the center of this long, circular chain of desires is the hope that somehow it will all make a difference, in my life in in yours; and the desire to make that difference happen -- to be a source of comfort, and inspiration, and wisdom for the members of this congregation, and then (together with your help), to help make the world a more comfortable, inspired, and wiser place to live.

Of course, even though life itself is a gift from the Universe, we all do still have to make a living...and (so far as we can know) we only get “one wild and precious life” to live. As far as nature is concerned, the purpose of life is to survive long enough to reproduce and create another generation...and everything else is pretty much extraneous. According to philosopher William Irvine, the process of evolution has shaped our desires in such a way that activities which contribute to nature’s purpose naturally give us pleasure (which thus makes them desirable); while things which are dangerous or detract from that purpose often cause us pain (thus warning us to avoid them).

This “biological incentive system” helps explain why food tastes good and loud, unexpected noises make our hearts race, yet it is hardly foolproof -- processed foods saturated with high fructose corn syrup may taste delicious to our evolutionary palate, causing us to crave them with an intensity beyond all reason, but this hardly means they are good for us, or conducive to our long-term evolutionary survival. Yet even when we know this intellectually, it takes an awful lot of will power to trump our emotional desire to eat the whole package of Oreos when we are feeling lonely and alone and afraid that no one loves us.

According to Irvine, “The relationship between the intellect and the emotions can best be viewed as an uneasy alliance.” The intellect is good at calculating what Irvine calls “instrumental desires” -- the things we decide we want to do in order to be able to do what we really want to do -- that is to say, the things that make us feel good. For example, “the intellect might point out...that what the emotions want would in fact feel bad, that what they want may feel good now but will feel bad later, or that although what they want would feel good, there is something else that would feel even better.”

Furthermore, Irvine continues, “The intellect can also help sort through conflicting emotions and determine which will be acted on and which won’t. The emotions are perfectly willing to listen to the intellect as long as the intellect isn’t trying to impose its views but is merely trying to help the emotions get what they want.” On the other hand, without some level of emotional buy-in, it is very difficult for the intellect alone to get us to do what we know is right, no matter how badly we may think we want it.

Because of this phenomenon, Irvine goes on to observe, “The relationship between the intellect and the emotions is therefore asymmetrical. Although the emotions have veto power over the intellect, in most cases the intellect only has the power of persuasion in its dealings with the emotions, and it can persuade them only if it can invoke a stronger emotion than the one it wants to suppress. Conversely, the intellect can form a desire, but if the emotions don’t commit, the resulting desire will be feeble. And if the emotions object, the resulting desire will be stillborn....”

“Why does the intellect play second fiddle to the emotions?” Irvine asks. “Why, in battles between the emotions and the intellect, do the emotions generally win? For the simple reason that they refuse to fight fairly. The emotions, in their dealings with the intellect, don’t use reason to gain its cooperation. Instead, they wear it down with -- what else? -- emotional entreaties. They beg, whine, and bully. They won’t take no for an answer. They won’t give the intellect a moment’s peace. In most cases, the best the intellect can hope for is to withstand these entreaties for a spell. Then it succumbs....”

The heart wants what it will, and no amount of willpower alone can dissuade it from its appetites. Neither is it especially reasonable in those appetites; rather, as we mature we often simply learn how better to use our Reason to rationalize our emotional desires, so that at least they might appear reasonable for the moment. No matter how intelligent or sophisticated we may think we are, our heads still generally serve our hearts, rather than the other way around. Advertisers understand this, of course; in fact it’s how they make their living, marketing to our feelings of dissatisfaction, and our appetite for more. And for some reason that would appear to defy all logic, no matter how much we may consume we never seem to feel satisfied.

Yet understanding this one simple thing about ourselves is the first step towards mastering our desires, and directing them toward a greater good. “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” wrote the philosopher David Hume. Our intelligence can tell us how to get from “A” to “B,” but it can not tell us whether or not “B” is really worth doing. For that we need our hearts.

We can not deduce “ought” from “is.” The facts alone will not tell us whether something is right or wrong; only our feelings can do that. But not feelings that are obsessed with the thirst to satisfy their own insatiable appetites. Rather, feelings which have discovered their own capacity for compassion, for experiencing the pain of others as if it was their own. Feelings which are hungry for both justice and mercy, and which understand both accountability and forgiveness. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” the Scripture tells us. When we learn how to direct our desires toward an internalized sense of what is right and what is good, toward a profound and passionate understanding of the spiritual laws that are written upon the heart, we become better and more sophisticated spiritual beings in our own right: no longer slaves to our desires, but rather partners with them.

Nature wants us to “be fruitful and multiply,” to procreate in order to give birth to a new generation of life itself. And so we have evolved to feel great pleasure in the act of love: to love our mates, to love our offspring, to love life itself and all the things about being alive that give us pleasure and a sense of satisfaction. Yet intellectually we also know that we share the fate of all living creatures, and that someday we must die. Mostly we try not to think about this too much, at least not consciously; but even so, the inescapable awareness of our own mortality which lingers just beneath the surface of our rational thoughts can generate within us a sort of restless fear, as well as the passionate desire to cling to life regardless of the cost -- to seek out wealth, and fame, and power beyond all proportion to our ordinary needs, as though if we could just become rich and famous and powerful enough we might somehow cheat death and live forever. Our heads know this isn’t true, but our hearts don’t care -- the heart wants what it wants, and rarely listens to reason unless (as the philosophers tell us) it finds it in its own best interest to do so.

And still, much of the wisdom of growing older grows out of the realization that there are many ways to be creative, there are many ways of becoming truly generous, which give the heart great pleasure and satisfaction even in the face of limited time and resources. The things we CHOOSE to give our hearts to: not just family and career (as important at these things are), but art, music, science and literature, our larger communities, works of compassion and justice-making, the health and well-being of the world itself...these are things which can not only give us great pleasure and satisfaction, they are also the things that potentially give our lives a larger meaning as well. But these are the topics I will address next week, when I speak about “Thy Heart’s Content.”