The Pilgrim Ache

Desire is not spontaneous — it is cultivated. James K. A. Smith argues that malls, screens, and stadiums function as rival liturgies, quietly shaping what your heart leans toward. Christian practices are a counter-formation, training the body to want differently.

Sabbath, as Walter Brueggemann describes it, is “the most radical social statement in Scripture.” It refuses the culture’s demand for endless production by teaching the body that your value is received, not earned. Rest is an act of theological resistance.

Communion does something similar. In receiving the body and blood of Christ, the logic of the market — which says you must acquire to be whole — is undone. What cannot be purchased is given freely. The table transforms consumption into participation.

Pilgrimage and worship complete the pattern. Psalm 84 describes pilgrims who travel “from strength to strength” — not faster, but deeper. Each practice trains the heart to wait, to wonder, and to worship. Desire does not disappear; it is redirected until, over time, longing itself becomes devotion.

Desire itself is not the problem — its direction is. Augustine identified the root of sin not as wanting too much but as loving rightly ordered things wrongly. The Psalter confirms this: Psalm 84 opens not with restraint but with intensity — “My soul longs, indeed it faints, for the courts of the Lord.” This is not a warning against desire; it is desire set right.

The goal is not smaller wants but reordered ones. As James K. A. Smith argues, human beings are not primarily thinkers — we are lovers, shaped by what we worship. Strong desires are not evidence of spiritual failure; they are evidence of what your heart has been trained toward. The question is not whether you want deeply, but whether your wanting has been bent toward God or curved inward on itself. Holy desire is not desire diminished — it is desire directed. To long rightly is to live truthfully before the One for whom you were made.

Augustine’s confession still rings true: “Our heart is restless until it rests in You.” The restlessness you feel is not a malfunction — it is a signal. It points to the fact that you were made for a presence that no created thing can provide.

But consumer culture has learned to exploit that ache. William Cavanaugh observes that consumerism “is not about having things; it is about wanting things.” The market manufactures yearning while denying rest — it needs you to stay hungry so you keep spending. The result is a heart that cannot settle, not because something is spiritually wrong with you, but because you have been formed by a system designed to keep you dissatisfied.

Psalm 84 offers a counter-formation. Its word for “blessed” — ashrê — comes from a root meaning to advance rightly, to go straight. Blessedness is not a feeling but an alignment. When desire is oriented toward God, the restlessness does not disappear immediately, but it begins to have a direction — and a destination.