How many of us really want life, life more abundant, life which does not promise any fringe benefits or early retirement plans? Life which does not promise the absence of pain, or love which is not vulnerable and open to hurt? Madeleine L’Engle
Three years ago, I toured Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Baseball fans know the sacredness of Wrigley with its green ivy outfield walls and its hand-turned scoreboard and the rooftop seating that looks down from across the street. We arrived for the tour more than three hours before the game, and our guide granted us entrance to empty grandstands rich with over one hundred years of stories. If you love baseball, Wrigley is likely on your bucket-list.
But the history of the hallowed park fascinated me less than what happened during our tour. Just inside the admission gate, our guide stopped our group to let the Los Angeles Dodgers pass on their way from the bus to the clubhouse. Ballplayers dressed in suits walked by without the slightest glance. I turned into a kid again, but perhaps not in the way you might think: I did not reach into my bag for a pen and Clayton Kershaw’s baseball card. Now into adulthood, megastars have long since lost their luster. Professional athletes are regular people with athletic gifts. When the MVP walked by, I didn’t want his autograph. Instead, I saw a man I always planned to be.
When I grow up, I want to play baseball.
Seeing Clayton Kershaw ignited my forgotten boyhood dreams and awoke a grief I had attempted to put to sleep. My career is over, and yet the pilot light still flickers. Since storing my glove and cleats away, I had moved on to much more practical ambitions. Then Kershaw walked by, and my flicker burst into flames: I still want to play baseball when I grow up.
I like life a lot better when I am not in the pangs of desire. It is easier not to live in want. And yet, a life lived void of desire is a spiritually and emotionally dead life. Life and faith with heart require we keep our pilot light lit, and it burns.
When we attempt to kill our dreams for fear of disappointment, we harm ourselves all the while thinking it’s for our own good. David Whyte says, “We cannot neglect our inner fire without damaging ourselves in the process.”
I still want to play Major League Baseball. I never will. Yet something true of me will die if I give up the desire. Three different truths live in this relationship: Desire. Reality. Identity.
When we cling to desire despite reality, we never mature. When we abandon desire for reality, we lose heart and the opportunity to live passionately. When we embrace both desire and reality, we give ourselves the chance to live present and fully as our broken and limited yet glorious selves.
Still, desire can be the cruelest of necessities, and thus we see it as an enemy of the heart. Simone Weil reminds us, “The danger is that the soul should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying.”
For those who are not thirsty or hungry for more, life will continue the same tomorrow as today. But for the hungry and thirsty, for those willing to be in pain for more, real life awaits.
The journey always starts with desire: I am limited. I want. I am not who or what or where I want to be. I cannot guarantee the life I want. And I will hope.
