Desiring and Being Desired by Christ: Sebastian Moore’s Notion of Desire in Dialogue with Ignatian Spirituality

Desire as participation in the creative mystery

Sebastian Moore conceived human desire rooted in God’s existence as Mystery and Creator. It is the anthropological point of impact where God attracts, manifests his presence and is received by man or woman. He systematised this conception writing an axiomatic that he called a ‘sort of grammar of desire’: ¹⁰

This passage illustrates his understanding of human desire as an expression of an inner fullness and the pedagogical process of arousal or awakening of desire by another person’s desire. Jesus is seen as the one who, because he is both man and God, can awake human desirability both from the outside and from the inside of human awareness. Later, he would use other words to say this, though maintaining the same conception of a desire that is called to expand itself, under a desiring relationship with another person to unlimited (divine) dimensions.

Self-love trusting in the mystery that embraces me is that essential act of living that we call desire. Desire, whereby alone a person lives, is the trusting relationship that binds the person to all being, becoming actual. […] Once we understand desire – all desire – as solicitation by the mystery we are in, we understand something that is often noted in spiritual writings: […] vital desires increases with satisfaction. […] Now if my trusting relationship with the mystery is what desire actuates, the enormous changes that that relationship undergoes will mean corresponding changes in desire. […] The process is one of desire coming ever more into its own, coming ever closer to being the actualization of that relatedness to the ultimate reality that the person is. ¹²

As these passages show, desire is understood by Moore as an ontological quality of the Self, both rooted in and oriented to the Mystery that is a creating loving desire able to awaken and bring liberation, fulfilment, to the human being by means of a true relationship. Identity is a process, a relationship in desire. It is the core of Self, full of sensibility and affection, a self-esteem received from another as gift.

Self-love is not love for self but love of self. […] The love of self is love with which I am myself in the world. […] This awakening of self-love is an increase in the sense of my significance. But significance is significance for someone, and the ‘someone’ here must be the unique person who is making me feel significant. So desire for this other person is the new feeling of my significance that he or she has awakened: a desire to become significant for that person. […] I become a mystery to myself. […] Thus Self-love, properly understood as creative of community, reveals its roots in the mystery of existence. As a community in embryo, self-love is an image of the Trinitarian Godhead, and is open to this original community. ¹³

The grace of discovering oneself as creature under God’s arousal of our desirableness for another is a deep experience of conversion, both religious and affective, received internally – I dare to say directly – as an experience of mystery and ignorant wisdom. The previous experienced state of ‘just wanting’ that Moore refers to sometimes, ¹⁴ a desire with content but with no particular object, that becomes a revelation of the original inner presence of the Creator, that will be only satisfied with His love and desire as object. Jesus will be the concrete and full manifestation of God’s presence and desire in one’s history. He is the one who awakens our deepest sense of desirability for another and de-limits it. He leads human desire through a process of expansion and transformation that is forgiveness of our sin and true liberation of our identity. Identity is, therefore, a continuous process of relationship to God in Christ that, understood in dialogue with Psychology and Spiritual Theology, can be explained as the death of the ego and, simultaneously, the liberation of Self through the Paschal Mystery of Jesus. ¹⁵

Desire and the notion of sin

As every person who embarks on the Christian adventure and accepts the offer of a loving relationship to Jesus, Sebastian Moore had to face himself with the reality of sin. Sin as an opaque and resistant condition inside human subjectivity that hinders and sometimes blocks the experience of God as a loving Other and of Jesus as trustful Master. Once more, he decided to offer an existential understanding of desire, as opposite to a metaphysical one, translating this theological and biblical notion to a reality that everyone, at least everyone with sufficient experience of life and of himself or herself, would recognise as identifiable, as an undeniable element of human life.

Once God and the subject’s Self is understood as desire awakened and extended to another, as an enhancer of the life of another person, the notion of sin appears, though mysterious and resistant to a crystal clear definition, as what contradicts, blocks and wounds the joyful experience of Self-Love and God’s love. Sin is extremely difficult to define precisely. Metaphorically, Moore calls it a ‘gangrene’ ¹⁶ of the self. More analytically, he wrote that sin is ‘the conviction that I am worthless’, ¹⁷ a willed worthlessness.

According to the scholastic tradition, sin in itself is irrational and unmotivated; there is a ‘mystery of iniquity’. While this is importantly true, it tends to be understood in too metaphysical a fashion. Phrases like ‘tending to nothingness’ get used. The point about a notion of sin as willed worthlessness is that it earths this airy language in something just perceptible. The ‘nothingness’ in question is the valuelessness, the meaninglessness, which something in us hankers for. The strict scholastic doctrine has no place for hankering, for that implies some motivation, some ‘good’. My notion is on the fine edge where the motivational element in sin (the pursuit of a ‘good’) us just disappearing into the mystery of iniquity. ¹⁸

Later Moore, as he generally did, elaborated this notion, under the influence of some psychologists, particularly Alice Miller ¹⁹ who, in Moore’s words, comes ‘close to describing psychologically the condition that we know theologically as original sin’. ²⁰ For Moore, sin is a split internal to desire as self-love ²¹ that is acquired (unconsciously) during the human process of constructing a particular self-identity, different and autonomous from another person’s (especially the mother or whoever took her place in the very first years of a child’s life). In his words, this sin is ‘a repression in people of the “true self”: the true self that does trust life that does want to grow, that does ‘desire to desire more’. ²²

Sin is a wound, an existential wound in self-esteem, in the loving force of desire as generous self-offer, an unconscious self-repression. For such a notion of sin, the metaphors of sin as invisible illness or disease directly rooted to our desiring self are adequate. That repression or lack of self-trust will be an object of a significant transformation by Jesus’ presence and his loving power, particularly in his mystery of Crucified and Resurrected.

Moore’s Soteriology is based in Jesus as the person without sin. Therefore, he could accept and embrace in him all forces of self-destruction, self-rejection and self-hate. His person is the territory where these obscures internal forces, present in the human being, are conquered and destroyed, by means of his plunge in the abyss of death and rejection of God.

In a late period of his life, Sebastian Moore discovered the work of René Girard and his mimetic theory. From that moment, he worked hard to introduce some elements of Girard’s mimetic theory to his understanding of human desire and, particularly, to his Soteriology. ²³ He particularly appreciated Girard’s understanding of Jesus as a creative model for desire, a model of someone who is able to desire without appropriation of the object desired.

What Moore took from Girard was, in his words,

the realization that this desire – which I still believe is absolutely crucial – is very, very complex. And not only that is very complex, that what are its complexities. Its complexities are mirroring complexities. So the complexities of desire involve me in conflict, in rivalry with others and also, of course, in admiration and love. ²⁴

I have not such positive evaluation of the influence of Girard’s theory in Moore’s Theology of Desire. My criticism of Girardian theory persuades me that it did not serve well Moore’s best intuitions and theology, ²⁵ an estimation that saddened him on hearing my view. Nonetheless, I believe Girard’s influence on Moore was not central to his existential notion of sin.

Principle and foundation

In the beginning of the SE, the text titled Principle and Foundation (PF) constitutes an existential introduction to Christian identity, mission and finality. It introduces the retreatant to the experience that his or her origin and permanent ontological support is rooted in the Trinity, in God’s desire and joy, as creative source of the human self and continuous support and care. He or she exists out of God’s ecstatic love. This is the foundational spiritual experience of existing as received from another person, valuable and pleasing, aroused in one’s desirableness. It is an experience that reveals human self-consciousness as received from an infinite, free and endless divine source of parental and creational love that does not impose himself upon the beloved but awakens and stirs up his creature desirableness. A source that is not only external, found or activated from the outside the retreatant’s self, but one discovered within the praying subjective consciousness as its core, an ontological gift requiring acceptance, correspondence and development.

Knowing oneself as being created by God ‘to praise, reverence and serve’ (SE 23) and, by means of it, saving one’s soul, equates in the SE with the opportunity to undergo an unforgettable spiritual experience of internal value and desire, of being valuable and desirable as one precisely is, of existing out of God’s desirability and, yet, being able to interact as a partner, desiring God and savouring His desirability. Such an experience imprints a sense of finality or telos. The retreatant knowns his or her life is full of purpose and meaning as he or she is created by God for a very particular destiny. This latter is an endless, desired and willed mutual glorifying love, in a relationship between himself or herself and the Trinity. Such a savoured and conscious knowing founds the absolute criterion that sets the existential orientation of human desire and love. This resonates with Moore’s own words: ‘There has also been in my life much sense of fullness, a sense of inner being […]. One thing that stands out is that the sense of fullness came entirely and only from contemplative prayer’. ³⁴

Therefore, every other creature, human or not, must not be seen and taken as expansion or final fulfilment of human desire, but rather as ‘a help in the pursuit of the end for which he [she] is created’ (SE 23). One must use an understanding of a creature to the extent that it helps us towards our end and freeing ourselves from it to the extent it hinders us from it. This is a rule of affective growing liberation and of desire’s orientation from this world, and its limited realities, to God as unlimited, endless transcendent object of desire. As the SE evolves, it becomes clearer that it is Jesus who is the concrete relationship and loving person who enables the created and divine desire to communicate, who creates a new paradigm of love and human happiness. Jesus, and he alone, by way of attracting and calling, allows every man and woman to engage, while still on earth and in history, in a process of liberation of desire and love, through a mutual surrendering of affection and will, that leads him or her to receive and respond to the transcendent and divine Trinity’s love and desire.

The retreatant’s existence is, from that moment on, personally called to the pursuit of happiness, of glorifying joy and pleasure that God alone offers. This choice requires a vigilance over all other affective attachments, other desires towards creatures that exist within the retreatant’s consciousness, in such a way that he or she accepts that ‘it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in regard to everything which is left to our free will and is not forbidden’ (SE 23). It is a process of detachment and (re)attachment. Following Jesus and identifying with him as much as the gifts of the Holy Spirit allows us, is now the way to proceed, in life on earth and beyond it, as a mission and a liberation of the inner source of love and desire every human being is by the fact that he or she is created by the Trinity for communion with the Trinity.

How do these dimensions of Ignatius’ PF relate and how are they present in Moore’s notion of desire? I believe the connection is evident and self-imposing. In both, we find the same positive understanding of desire as an energy of Self, good and divine in its core or centre, yet needed of orientation, purification and liberation in order to attain its existential destiny of communion in love and reverence with the Trinity, in Jesus.

The first week: sin and forgiveness

In the structure of the SE, the PF is followed by the First Week, a meditation and contemplation of sin, both as reality existing previous and autonomous to human existence (the mysterium iniquitatis as the great cause of pain and disorientation). It is present within the creation and particularly affects human beings on the several levels as they try to receive God’s loving presence in their lives and respond to him consciously and willingly. The meditation of sin is presented in a gradual and progressive deepness: angels’ sin, Adam and Eve’s sin, a concrete human person’s sin (not the retreatant, though) and, finally, the retreatant’s own sins. There is a growing sense of the historical enrooting of sin, of its closeness to life as the retreatant knows it, its concrete presence and consequences both internal and external to a person’s self and behaviour. It is presented as hindering and blocking energy that distorts the reception of God’s love within the praying subject and makes difficult the affective experience that God’s will must be equated with the person’s deeper and endless joy and happiness. Sins distorts and disorients a relationship built out of the pleasure of being loved and awakened in desire, of trust in the absolute power to give life and happiness that remains in the Trinity.

What is striking, both in the structure of this First Week and in Sebastian theology of desire, is the role of the Crucified Christ as the only and divine answer that Trinity’s Love gives to the mystery of sin and to a sinner in particular. Before allowing the retreatant to contemplate his or her own sins in the most concrete and precise way, ³⁵ Ignatius tells the retreatant to ‘imagine Christ our Lord suspended on the cross before you, and converse with him in a colloquy’ (SE 53). The Crucified Christ is the only and absolute answer that God gives to sin, to all human sins and those of a particular person. There is a mystery of love and forgiveness, of grace and recreation flowing from the Crucified, hanging patiently and passively in front of the sinner who contemplates not only the awfulness of sin, its brutal consequences of violence and pain but also the infinite power of God’s love, patience and power to go beyond pain and death in that precise mystery of His Son’s crucifixion and death. ³⁶

The mystery of Christ’s kenosis till death as a crucified man, deconstructs the experience of God’s love towards the sinner. Jesus, the man without sin, appears as the one who can accept all the suffering someone’s sins can cause, even death. He does it in a free, willed and loving decision, as his mission, revealing another ‘logic’ in God, one far beyond retributive justice, culpability or punishment. Its core is the experience of being loved, accepted and forgiven as sinner, not besides being a sinner. Yet it is more: the Crucified’s death is a way of returning to the Father, connecting history with eternity, creature with the Trinity in the Son of God. It is a passage from the horrors of solitude in hell and isolation to fulfilment and joy.

Sebastian Moore had experienced something of the density and meaning of the Crucified Jesus long before his Ignatian retreat in 1971, while he was a student in Rome during the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Nevertheless, as he refers, though it was an important apprehension, it was soon forgotten.

Quietly, and with a part of the mind that does not wrestle with concepts, I knew that the whole thing was there: the act of aggression, of sin, releasing the waters of grace. This holistic vision, this symbolic concentration of truth, I experienced and was nourished by – and promptly forgot. For nearly fifteen years. ³⁷

From the seventies on, Moore focused his theological thought on exploring and deepening into this mystery of sin, as an existential experience of blockage of human richness and potential happiness, of the true Self, self-appropriated in his consciousness and presented to the Crucified as Victim for himself, for each one of us. I believe this developing attention to sin as experienced by the existential subject, gradually known as present and hiding in the depths of one’s consciousness, gradually unveiled by Grace and self-awareness, is his particular way of continuously revisiting the Ignatian First Week whose petition of grace reads, ‘to ask for shame and confusion about myself’ (SE 49) and ‘a growing sorrow and tears for my sins’ (SE 55). It is important to add that, in Ignatius intention, this confusion and tears are not of culpability or repression, but are, rather, the result of the unsuspected and moving reception of a love so deep, so able to accept the retreatant, to forgive him or her in such a way that it is felt as a moving ‘excess’ of Grace. In few words, this is a first experience of being recreated.

Reflecting upon personal sin is a hard work. Self-appropriating the deepest levels and shadows of that sin is difficult. Notwithstanding such difficulty, Sebastian worked once and again his existential understanding of sin. He came to a point where he understood the tendency to guilt and self-punishment (sometimes unconsciously done) as the deepest level of sin’s mystery because it prevents the person to be himself or herself for another. ‘The radical guilt is unhappy love’. ³⁸

Sin is not only, and perhaps not most significantly, what other people do to us, or what we do to other people, but what we do to ourselves as consequence of an inner wound in self-love, self-sense of value, self-esteem. The Crucified Jesus is the one who accepts, suffers, shows and transforms the wounds that are inflicted by another person but especially, self-inflicted. Sebastian’s retreat notes included in The Fire and Rose Are One ³⁹ attest this discovery:

[…] To expose myself to the loving of God will involve the falling-away of layer upon layer of covering of the wound of emptiness, the wound of not-being-anyone satisfactory. […] I do not let God love me because I do not love myself. […] Point of entry. I would find the point of entry. The inner nothing is not the void that God fills. It is the failure to be of the being that God loves. ⁴⁰

The wish to know his inner barrier to God’s love led Moore to understand the depths of sin as a split within self-love (split between desire and control, between self-love and self-gift), a repression of self-love or self-esteem. ⁴¹

The experience of forgiveness as recreation belongs, in Sebastian’s experience, both to the First Week and the Third Week (the contemplation of Jesus’ passion) of the SE. Both are the context that allows Moore to see in the crucified Jesus the victim that confronts him with what he hides in himself, accepts it and heals him.

I am learning, of the crucified, to reside in the awkwardness, of the self-surrendered to rest in this otherwise impossible place. This is the first lesson of true self-loving. It comes entirely from the bleeding hands and feet. It is true rest, true centredness. ⁴²

The second week: following and accompanying Jesus as the chosen one

Following the parallel between the SE and Moore’s theology of desire, I would like to emphasise that his understanding of spiritual transformation is based on the process of following Jesus as a disciple. Moore’s reconstruction of the disciples awake to love follows theological structure of the Second Week and its petition of grace: ‘to ask for interior knowledge of Our Lord, who became human for me, that I may love him more intensely and follow him more closely’ (SE 104).

This structural phase of the SE is based on the contemplation of Christ, on the grace of vocation as personalised love and desire (election) and the need, on the part of the exerciser, to make the decision to accept (or reject) that call and to follow the Master. This following of Christ is twofold: the bliss of apostolic success, the inner experience of being desirable and loved (by Jesus and the Trinity) and the painful situations of rejection, temptation, betrayal, violent opposition and sense of God’s absence. The retreatant contemplates the whole mystery of Incarnation: from the Trinitarian decision that makes the Son of God take human nature and incarnate in Mary, through the years of his occult life, to the final decision to accept a destiny of death to the hands of sinners as the extreme gift of Love in face of rejection.

At this point, the retreatant is undergoing a personal reconstruction of Jesus mystery, as he or she accompanies Jesus’ process of developing a consciousness of self and mission, as a human being who discovers himself as the Son of God, the Saviour who attracts and seduces his disciples to freely follow him as a reciprocal experience of desire and love. This is the setting that allows Moore to reconstruct the disciples’ experience of being awaken out of their desirability, as a reorientation of their desire from the creatures of this world to concentrate it on Jesus and beyond this world. The Master, says Moore, because he is the man without sin and the Son of God, offers the only relationship that opens creatural desire to the infinite and transcendent Trinitarian Love. Through the fixation of the disciples’ desire in Jesus, they are taken into the de-limiting of this desire. It is a bitter–sweet phase, made of pleasure and pain, of sense and loss, of communion in love and of being plunged into the horrific emptiness (similar to entering hell) until the resurrected Christ fulfils the disciple from within a direct experience of a new, divine, capacity to receive and give love.

In 2007, I met Sebastian Moore at Downside and questioned him about this process in his theology. Knowing the SE, I had the intuition that he had applied Lonergan’s method of intentionality analysis to his own experiences within the framework of Ignatius SE. I shared with him my belief that, by using the change in the disciples to shed light into process of inner transformation of Jesus’, he was projecting (or self-appropriating in a hermeneutical way) his own experience of following Jesus to his theology. I share here some of those exchanged words.

T: […] And I thought to myself, well, on the one side, if your work were to be a scientific description, yes, you would know too much. But, as you were saying, my feeling was that you were somehow – I don’t know if consciously or unconsciously – you were projecting your own experience to the disciples.

S: Oh, absolutely! Yes!

T: And so, what you knew, what you did know about them was what you were experiencing.

S: I should have said that, you see?! I should have been quite honest and said ‘What I’m doing here is saying what I would have felt!’

T: And, you see, that’s precisely my grounding to say: I can approach these writings from the Spirituality’s point of view because what is being said here is, above all and beneath all, a personal experience.

S: Yes, yes.

T: So, you would agree with this interpretation.

S: Oh yes, entirely! [34:28] Yes, yes! ⁴³

Much before our meeting, Sebastian Moore (and other authors) had already defended his work from some criticism towards his hermeneutic of the disciples’ transformation. ⁴⁴ The following of Jesus to his passion is a consequence of the awakening of human desirability by Jesus, in lyric joy and love. This is

being awakened to ‘the other within’ […] the sense of myself as special that motivates my going out to others and seeks positive relationships. […] Jesus, because he deeply knows himself to be special in God’s sight, embraces in love the whole world. ⁴⁵

The Second Week of the SE consists of this reciprocal relationship between the retreatant and Jesus that Moore refers to, with its ups and downs. It consists in a reciprocal surrendering and attraction between Jesus and the disciple that provokes in the later a decision to follow the Master with no other securities but his company, until the passion unfolds.

The third week: Jesus’ betrayal and deliverance to die on a Cross

The Third Week of the SEs, in which takes place the drama of the betrayal, crucifixion and death of Jesus, is centred on the passivity and fragility of the humanity of the Son of God, his obedience and freedom. As Ignatius stresses, Jesus’ ‘divinity hides itself […] and allows his most holy humanity to suffer so cruelly’ (SE 196). The abrupt disappearance and loss of Jesus, in such circumstances, contemplated by the retreatant as a scandalising failure, a humiliation, sets the spiritual context for the dark night of the disciples left alone in the middle of sin and violence and in the absence of the Master’s presence. Moore equates this moment with the subjective experience of the human consciousness losing the known object of its desire and, therefore, entering the abyss of loss of meaning and purpose, of affective and existential support and stimulus to continue living. And of meeting the fear, guilt and rejection of love that hides within each disciple. It is an experience of (spiritual) death while being alive: a deprivation of the sensible object of desire. Moore describes it in his theology as the ‘emptiness of human desire’, a certain kenosis. Awful as it sounds and is, this is an important stage of the transformation and Christification of the disciple’s identity, a true dark night of the soul (of the self would say Moore) as Saint John of the Cross has put it. It is a dive in inner utter spiritual desolation. Without the felt presence of Jesus, the life he had awakened and brought out of the disciples is touched by a sense of void, of emptiness. It is a deprivation of a previous happy life and, therefore, the experience of a certain kind of death caused by sin and by the fact that Jesus let himself be the victim of that sin until the end. Jesus’ presence is, still in his death, performative and transformative on the disciples’ desire. This death of theirs due to communion in love is, simultaneously (though they do not know it by then), a recreation and the de-limiting (expansion) of desire so that it can receive the Trinity’s desire and open up to a deeper communion. The crucified, wounded and dead shows the disciples their true condition as sinners: they are the ones wounded, self and other-punishing. Into that mysterious rejection and violence Jesus descends. To that inner place of death, he goes willingly to make himself room for being received from the interior, without a blocking rejection.

The fourth week: the encounter with the Risen Jesus and the reception of the Holy Spirit

Finally, in the Fourth Week of the retreat, Saint Ignatius invites the exerciser to contemplate the encounters of the disciples with the resurrected Christ, to contemplate the new creation: a new human being who is also God. Jesus receives a new title and office given by Ignatius: He is the Consoler who has now the office consoling his disciples after such a tragic experience (cf. SE 224).

Particularly sticking to me is the fourth point with which Ignatius proposes praying encounter with the resurrected Jesus: ‘Consider how the divinity, which seemed hidden during the Passion, now appears and manifests itself so miraculously in this holy Resurrection, through its true and most holly effects’ (SE 223).

This is the moment in which Moore sees the paschal faith being born. The presence of that Resurrected man produces effects in the consciousness of the disciples as it produces in the retreatant who contemplates this mystery: the previous state of emptiness and void is changed into a state of fulfilment and rebirth. The intensity and gratuity of that change is such that it demonstrates that such a man is not only a man but God, for only God can bring out someone from hell into a totally unknown state of new life and love. He resurrects the spirituality dead disciples so that they can be themselves, in Him, for other people. And this is a contagious event that inaugurates a contagious memory. In that living memory, we all have our own part to play.

From this experience, a new community is formed and shaped. Its support and reason of existence is no other than the quality of the personal encounter with the Resurrected and the intensity of the interior changes felt by the disciples in this new relationship. Paschal faith in Jesus as the Kyrios is born out of this experience, along with the sense for belonging to only Jesus, Son of God, the one who conquers sin, death and all inner resistances. This is the moment where the experience of God as the merciful one re-flourishes in the SE. But it is also a moment of transformative cure and healing. ‘Jesus is for us someone who has shown us that we are lovable precisely where we experience ourselves as hateful. And that, alone, is the vision that saves us’. ⁴⁶