Desire

DESIRE

Table of Contents

Desiring Unity: Reflections on Protest and Protestantism

Sharmaine Koh

A Fear of Far Drops

Bella Gamboa

The Promise of Greatness

Raquel Sequeira

The Weight of Expectations

Serena Puang

An Ordinary Love

Logos Masthead

To Want to Want: Desiring Differently

Jason Lee

A Dialogue on Desire at Durfee’s

Ben Colon-Emeric

Thoughts on Catholic Liturgy and Expressive Individualism

Jadan Anderson

Delaying Satisfaction: When Tomorrow Never Comes

Bradley Yam

The Distance from Here to Paradise: Restoring Community

Sharla Moody

4

8

10

12

15

16

18

20

22

24

Photograph credits: Bella Gamboa (6, 8, 20, 22); Serena Puang (25); Luc Sequeira

(10-11, 15, 17); Bradley Yam (front and back covers); Canva (20-21); Unsplash,

https://unsplash.com/photos/ShqedU-G68Q (15). Original drawings by Serena

Puang. Layout by Bella Gamboa.

2

◆ Fall 2019

Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader,

We all want something. As Yalies, we are constantly thinking about how to get what

we want. Yet we seldom pause to ask “What do I really want?” or even “What is worth wanting?”

Whether it’s a relationship or an internship, our desires can make us ecstatic or plunge

us into despair. For something so essential to life, we rarely stop to consider desire.

Economists assume that desires are unlimited. Freudian Psychologists assume that all

desire comes from sex and aggression. Christian tradition has a rich but often unexplored

corpus of thinking about desire, against the backdrop of a set of sensitive and nuanced

portrayals of desire in the biblical text. From these emerge one of Christianity’s most radical

claims: that man’s ultimate desire is for God, and that his incarnation as Jesus Christ in bodily

form is a promise of the satisfaction of all desires, physical, emotional and spiritual, in a love

relationship between God and man.

We, the staff at The Yale Logos, believe in the redemption and satisfaction of all our

desires in Jesus Christ. We believe the claims that Christianity makes about our desires are

profitable and worthy of consideration regardless of the reader’s religious background. We

explore the desire for unity, for belonging, and for paradise. We ask where do these desires

come from? How can we evaluate them? How can we change them (or even want to change

them)? Most of all, we ask what these desires have to do with a Christian God.

C.S. Lewis summarizes the Christian claim this way: “We are far too easily pleased”

(C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory). We strive to desire better, not just desire more, and to do

so together with the whole community of Yale in all our pursuits, academic and otherwise.

To that end, I invite you to join us in the conversation, for which this journal can only be an

introduction.

Truth and Love,

Bradley Yam

Editor-in-Chief

logos ◆ 3

Desiring Unity: Reflections on Protest and Protestantism

Sharmaine Koh-Mingli

Protest

Open your G-cals. Type in “Yale Campus Protest”

sometime in the next semester. We can probably log a

protest into our calendars with more certainty than we

can schedule that let’s-grab-a-meal meal.

Part of this certainty arises from the constancy

and regularity of the Yale Protest. The image of a

colourful crowd ringed by tanned gothic walls is all

too familiar and frequent. There are fresh faces from

walked-out-of lectures. There are lips shaped like “O”s

for shouts and “o”s for boos (and “ok boomer”). There

are fingers clenched white around signs and loudhailers.

In their time-stopping, cop-defying resistance, the passionate

motley compels the world to stop and listen.

As I look at the faces of peers just like me —

poised to shout a slogan, stony in defiance, or alight in

hopeful laughter — a deep sense of empowerment I

can’t quite describe bubbles up within me. But even as

my heart swells with the slogans, and I scavenge for the

will raise my fist, I doubt. Suddenly their banners and

fists seem vacuous and performative, misguided and divisive.

I confront the dissention of my classmates with

a conflicting allergic discomfort. I walk away confused

and disappointed with myself, wondering why and how

to grapple with a simultaneous rapture and repugnance

towards this spectacle.

As I delve deeper into this inner conundrum,

I recognise the shutters with which I consider protest.

Where I come from, unlicensed public demonstrations

are illegal. In Singapore, we are raised to be hyper-conscious

of vulnerability, suspicious of dissent, and protective

of order. Afraid of fracture, we sweep inconvenient

alternative truths under the carpet because to confront

them, we must struggle amongst ourselves. Underneath

the suave confidence of a small state, there is a nagging

fear that there is little else left for us without the ability

to agree among just 6 million people. We have come to

accept our absence of protest culture as a necessary sacrifice.

And there is fruit in this “unity”, too. There is no

doubt that internal stability — whether artificially imposed

by a heavy-handed state or not — is part of what

has allowed us to grow and thrive. We look to crippling

protests and restive disunity in our neighbourhood with

wary eyes and give thanks that “it doesn’t happen here.”

But surely, I think, this settling for a limited unity

bodes only an empty house. Behind the cheery facade,

feuds simmer under saccharine smiles, its members go to

sleep with unresolved disagreements, elephants in rooms

are ignored. As things fall apart, it seems insufficient to

hush protests and trample on truths in a desperate attempt

to just hold it all together. An aversion to trouble is

not a desire for unity. You do not want to live under the

roof of a house you no longer believe in. You couldn’t

ask a Hong Kong citizen to stay acquiescent to what they

see as Chinese hegemony in the interest of “unity”. You

couldn’t expect Ho Chi Minh or Gandhi to place independence

on the backburner for imperial “unity”. You

couldn’t envision student activists at Yale being “complicit”

with the administration’s investments in fossil fuels

for some campus “unity”.

Therefore, I see on the other hand the need for

protest. I recognise the fruit in its struggle for a vision

of truth, for the traumas of the last century have produced

a character more insidious that the rabble-rousing

protestor — the bystander. Writing after the fall of Nazi

Germany, German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller

penned a poetic confession concerning the cowardice of

the Protestant clergy, the German intellectuals, and himself:

First they came for the socialists, and I did

not speak out —

Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and

I did not speak out —

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not

speak out —

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no

one left to speak for me.

— Martin Niemöller, “First they came …”

(United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum)

Today, we have cultivated a Niemöllerean aversion

to this passive submission. There is no pride in the

guilt from all sides, Germans and Christians alike. In the

face of feverish national unity, Niemöller held his tongue.

As Hitler justified anti-semitism with the writings of Luther,

Christian fellows preserved their peace. Swept up in

the currents of right-wing nationalism, people watched

Germany unite under a swastika and murder millions of

Jews. Sure, in the mass mobilisation of Total War, Naziism

united the nation. Nobody protested. But today,

nobody praises Nazi Germany for its unity during the

war. Today, nobody praises the many around the world

who stood passive in the face of genocide. They were not

united. They were complicit.

4

◆ Fall 2019

Protestantism

Martin Niemöller reminds me of another German Lutheran.

Four centuries earlier, this other German Lutheran

Martin — Martin Luther himself — took a decidedly

different approach. Luther was a monk responsible for

starting the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic

Church. Appraising the state of the Catholic Church in

1517, Luther saw its corruption, objected to the excesses

of papal authority, and published a substantial thesis

detailing 95 points of practical and doctrinal disagreements.

Protestants today are named for Luther’s revolutionary

protest.

I consider all of this with conflicted fallibility,

navigating the complexities of my own Catholic identity.

In Luther’s protest, I recognise the courage that

Niemöller lacked. In Luther’s eyes, it would be a greater

sin to stay silent and preserve a superficial unity, than to

resist the corruption of his Catholic contemporaries. But

I also see the painful legacy of division that the Reformation

bred — 500 years of flurried mitosis that leaves us

with more than 38,000 denominations today.

So I struggle as the Catholic Church struggles

to discard the indignant hurt that the Reformation has

bred. I struggle with an acquired moral authority that

comes with believing we were the “one, holy, catholic

and apostolic church” fighting against the legacy of a

protest that was “heretical, scandalous, false, offensive

to pious ears or seductive of simple minds, and against

Catholic truth” (Pope Leo X, 1520). I am saddened that

even as I find love and joy in exploring my faith with my

Protestant brothers and sisters, on Sundays we still worship

at different churches. My desire for reconciliation

and Christian unity is restrained by an obligatory counter-protest

to Luther’s protest.

“The unity willed by God can be attained

only by the adherence of all to the content

of revealed faith in its entirety. In matters of

faith, compromise is in contradiction with

God who is Truth. In the body of Christ, “the

way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), who

could consider legitimate a reconciliation

brought about at the expense of the truth?”

[emphasis added]

— Ut unum sint, Pope John Paul II (The Vatican

website) 1

Such is Christianity’s tragic desire for unity.

Martins and John Pauls, Protestants and Catholics, protestors

and protested-against, even if seemingly opposed,

don’t actually disagree on this fundamental thing. They

recognise that true unity needs to be founded on truth.

The problem then, is confronting our different version of

truth.

St. Augustine provides a nice analogy for the

necessity of truth to unity.

“Justice being taken away, then, what are

kingdoms but great robberies? For what are

robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?

The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled

by the authority of a prince, it is knit together

by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is

divided by the law and agreed on.”

— The City of God, Book IV, St. Augustine

(Trans. Marcus Dodds, 1950, Modern Library

ed.)

If we assume that kingdoms stand on the side

of justice and have apprehended some form of truth,

this big band of men is respected for its unity. But unity

among a band of robbers can hardly be celebrated — it

seems absurd to respect men for uniting around unjust

deeds.

Thus, I realise that protest in and of itself is not

the problem, but the solution. Underlying the spirit of

protest and protestantism is a desire for both truth and

unity. When the rabble is roused and the banners are

raised, we are alerted to the fact that the truth around

which we might once have united has gone awry. If unity

needs truth, disunity signals that truth has not been attained.

Society has gotten something wrong, and protest

points it out. We must keep looking and keep struggling.

Therefore, protest — ostensibly divisive, arguably polarising

— is paradoxically what will realise our desire for

truth and unity. With this, I resolve my discomfort with

the protester, recognising that there is good in them.

For the desire for unity really is a desire

for truth, in its need for a common

ground to stand on. As truth dissolves in

the post-modern world, that grounding is

increasingly hard to find.

But if protest is the solution, why have we not

resolved anything? I consider the Yale protest again. Every

semester, with the regularity of moon cycles, Yale

protesters gather in front of Salovey’s office and yell at his

impervious windows. Every semester, Yale administrators

pace about their offices, draw the blinders to survey

the chanting crowd, then sit down to send a school-wide

email. Every semester, the protesters and the provosts go

home after a day of protesting and listening to protests,

pat themselves on the back for yelling and listening to the

yells respectively, and fall asleep to the musical sounds of

free speech and healthy discourse.

Perhaps we continue to sleep at night because

the permission of protest has ironically become a flimsy

band-aid for our cowardice. Underlying a tolerance for

protest is a learned respect for the equality of opinions,

however different. But these differences also worry us because

we doubt whether they can actually be reconciled.

As religion encounters atheism, as conservatives encounter

liberals, as Yale protestors encounter Peter Salovey,

logos ◆ 5

they recognise in each other sometimes fundamentally

contrary positions. The right to protest becomes our response

to this uncomfortable difference. Protest

simply becomes a ritual to remind ourselves

that we agree to disagree. But we stay

in the little kingdoms of people who agree

with us. Now and then, we

open the windows to

let in the noises that other

kingdoms are making in our backyard, and we pat ourselves

on the back for even opening the windows. The

noise, however, is merely ambient. We don’t really listen

to each other.

Beyond Protest

The words of another Martin Luther come to mind.

“At 11:00 on Sunday

morning when we stand

and sing and Christ

has no east or west,

we stand at the most

segregated hour in

this nation. This

is tragic. Nobody of

honesty can overlook this

[…] The first way that the

church can repent, the first

way that it can move out

into the arena of social

reform is to remove the

yoke of segregation from

its own body.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.,

in a Q&A session at Western

Michigan University,

December 18 1963 (God

and Culture, 2010)

Speaking in Jim Crow America,

King lamented the Church’s failure

to uphold its responsibility as “the

moral guardian of community” by not

starting a movement of desegregation.

The Civil Rights leader spoke specifically

of racial division, but his words

are hauntingly relevant to the unity of

the Church as a whole today.

What happens after the protest?

In the context of the Church,

we built separate churches. We worshipped

in separate places on Sundays.

We settled for unity within our

individual denominations. But in

some other ways, we moved forward.

In 1999, after extensive ecumenical

dialogue, the Catholic Church and the

Lutheran World Federation signed the

Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of

Justification. The revolutionary doctrine

professed “a common understanding

of our justification by God’s

grace through faith in Christ”, the

doctrinal point at the very root of the

initial conflict. In 2015, Catholics and

Protestants jointly held a prayer service in Sweden to

commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant

Reformation. It has taken us 500 years, but today, the

movement towards ecumenism, or Christian unity, is a

hopeful détente of sorts.

Part of the reason why Christian unity is so

urgent and necessary is because we recognise that the

Church was not meant to be divided in this way. In Co-

6

◆ Fall 2019

lossians 3:15, Paul writes: “Let the peace of Christ rule

in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one

body.” Because of this intended wholeness in Christ,

there is widespread recognition that Christians have a

responsibility to mend divisions in the Church that has

for a long time festered in its fallen state.

But outside of the Church, the desire for unity

feels somewhat more muted. Somehow, it feels as though

the world has stopped believing that it is better together.

Underlying semesterly protests, political unrests, and

international strife, is a bewildering paradox. The resistance

clings to a desperate hope that their protest will

change things, but at the same time doesn’t believe that

the other side will ever “get it”. In a bitter loss of trust

and faith, protestors keep up the yelling to be heard.

So what happens after the protest? In the context

of Yale and the world, the protesters pack up and

go home. They come back again tomorrow, next week,

or next semester. The protest starts again, and the cycle

continues ad infinitum. Or, if the belligerents choose

non-confrontation, the resistance breaks away, lives a

separate existence, spawns an alternative culture. If

they choose revolution, history has often proven it to be

bloody and tragic. Either way, the relationship is essentially

antagonistic, and we stop daring for radical reconciliation

because it seems so unattainable.

The Christian case is a fortunate one,

because God has revealed to us the necessity

of our unity in Him. No matter the

disagreement, our concomitant desire for

truth is founded in Christ.

As I consider Luther’s contest and the Yalies’

protests, their legacies make the desire for unity seem

like a tragic one, for the desire for unity really is a desire

for truth, for a common ground to stand on. As hope in

truth dissolves in the post-modern world, that grounding

is increasingly hard to find. But straddling my cosmopolitan

and Catholic identities, I wonder if the Church’s

own experience with division might hold kernels of wisdom

that the wider world can look towards. Surveying

the history of Catholic tension with Protestants has been

surprisingly and remarkably hope-giving. It has taken us

500 years, but in those years we have revised our respective

positions, we have learned to listen, and we have actively

sought out areas of agreement, while holding fast

to certain principles that distinguish us. It is some proof

that a desire for unity, a tempered patience, a passage of

time, and a deep faith to lean on God, will bear fruit.

One thing Christianity does well is daring to

posit and pursue an absolute Truth. No matter how vehemently

Methodists disagree with Mormons or Seventh-Day

Adventists, they all assert that God, at the very

least, is Truth. In the plurality of today’s world, this profession

that truth is absolute has fallen out of fashion.

Relativism — the belief (ironically) that “truth is relative”

— has often served as a conservative and cautious

cop-out to the overwhelming number of beliefs in our

world.

But we do ourselves no justice by asserting that

truth is relative and using that as a justification for separate

existences, veiling it as “mutual respect”. For nobody

takes to the streets to protest or counter-protest a

truth that they think is relative. Seeing different beliefs

as “relative truths” is not respectful, but patronising. We

are simply duplicitous fence-sitters that declare “everyone

is right, subjectively”, while really believing that we

are more right. Relativism’s moralising, self-contradicting

ambivalence makes us no different from the silent

Niemöllerean bystander. It is a defence mechanism that

really veils a deep-seated insecurity of having one’s own

beliefs challenged. The protester or the protested-against,

in contrast, fare better when they boldly posit that they

believe their perspective better approximates the absolute

truth. And it stops short of bigotry if they open up

this belief to challenge from opponents, in humble conversation

with others as co-searchers for truth.

Thus, the pursuit of unity must start with the

desire for truth that underlies the instinct to take an absolute

stand and protest. When communities start to fray

and fall apart, protest endeavours to revitalise unity by

signalling that truth has lost its way. But with each act

of protest, we are in danger of exchanging our artificial

unity for a convenient disunity, where a limited sense of

agreement is easier established in smaller and smaller

groups. We have to go further. The desire for unity must

be carried through beyond the protest. All sides must

dare to believe in reunification.

The Christian case is a hopeful one, because

God has revealed to us the necessity of our unity in Him.

No matter the disagreement, our concomitant desire for

truth is founded in Christ. Charged with a teleological

mission, we are convicted to strive towards Truth Himself.

In the endeavour’s seeming unattainability, we have

God to lean on and faith that His will be done on earth

as in heaven. Outside of God, the picture is rather different.

Yet no matter what form secularism’s absolute Truth

takes, belief in its fundamental attainability and the necessity

of unity charges the secular establishment and the

secular activist with a greater urgency and moral responsibility

to keep striving. If not faith in God, progress at

least requires faith in the humanity of the other side. If

we really hold such faith, maybe our G-cals might look a

little different next semester. Maybe we can grab a meal

with Salovey. We can only hope.

1

Ut unum sint, “That they may be one”, is a 1995

encyclical by Pope John Paul II on the Catholic

Church’s relations with the Orthodox churches and

other Christian ecclesiastal communities. An authoritative

document on the Catholic church’s ecumenical

commitment, it reinforces the need for unity in

the Church, and further dialogue with Protestants.

logos ◆ 7

A Fear of Far Drops

Bella Gamboa

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an epic poem dating from the

early first century CE, is a collection of tales of transformation,

many of which remain quite well known in some

form today. Among these stories is that of Daedalus,

the ill-fated artisan who is exiled to Crete, and his son,

Icarus. What follows is an original translation of Ovid’s

Latin text.

Daedalus loathed Crete and his long exile;

he was filled with longing for his home, the place of

his birth, but the vast sea separated him from it.

“Minos, king of Crete, may obstruct our escape

by land or sea,” he said, “but the sky is yet clear.

We will take that path: though he might possess everything,

even Minos does not control the air.”

As Daedalus spoke, he directed his mind to

previously unknown arts. Now, he makes nature itself

new. He puts feathers in ascending order, beginning

from the smallest, with the short feathers following

the long — you could imagine they grew along a

slope, like a rustic panpipe that rises up little by little,

with uneven stalks. Then he fastens the center of

the feathers with flax and their edges with wax; and

he bends the structures which he assembled so that

they resemble real wings.

Meanwhile, Daedalus’ son, Icarus, stands

nearby. Not knowing that he handles his own ruin, his

face beaming with pleasure, Icarus begins capturing

feathers, which he lifts with his breath; just now, he

softens the golden wax with his thumb — and his

playing hinders the wondrous work of his father.

After Daedalus placed the finishing touch on

this undertaking, the craftsman balances his body in

the pair of wings, and, as his wings strike the air, he

hangs aloft.

Daedalus equips his son and says, “Icarus, I

warn you to fly quickly in the middle way. Do not go

too low, for the water will weigh down your wings;

and if you soar too high, the sun’s fire will scorch

you. Do not be distracted by the constellations – not

the Deer-keeper or Ursa Major, nor the unsheathed

sword of Orion. Rather, be sure to follow my lead,

and seize the way!”

As he gives his son this advice for flying,

Daedalus fastens the unfamiliar wings onto Icarus’

shoulders. Between the work and the warning, his

aged cheeks grow wet, and the fatherly hands tremble;

he gives kisses to his son, not to be repeated

again. Daedalus flies ahead, lifted by his wings. He

fears for his companion, just like a bird that leads

forth its fragile offspring from their high nest into the

air. Daedalus encourages his follower; he instructs

Icarus in the damned art, and shifts his own wings to

look around at those of his son.

Those who catch sight of them flying — a

fisherman trying to catch fish with his rod, or a shepherd

with his staff, or a farmer leaning on his plough

— are amazed and believe those who can soar over

the sky to be gods.

And as they begin to pass by the islands —

on the left side lies Junonian Samos (Delos and Paros

had been left behind), Lebinthos on the right; and

Calymne, overflowing with honey — the boy begins

to delight in daring flight. He deserts his leader and

pursues a higher path, as he flies full of desire for

the sky. The nearness of the swift sun softens the

sweet-smelling waxes that bind the feathers; the

waxes gradually melt.

Icarus shakes his arms, now bare; but, lacking

wings, he cannot catch hold of the air. His lips,

forming the name of his father, are received by the

sapphire sea, which afterwards was named for him.

And the unlucky father, now no longer a

father, cries, “Icarus, Icarus, where are you? Where

should I seek you? Icarus!” he calls out.

But then he catches sight of feathers in the

waves, and he curses his skill. He lays Icarus to rest in

a grave. That island is since called by the name of the

buried.

From a ditch, a cackling partridge watches

the unfortunate son being placed in a muddy tomb.

The bird claps his wings and reveals his joy with song.

At that time, this bird, called a perdix, was unique and

had never been seen before — it was created but recently

as an eternal record of your crime, Daedalus.

Once, Daedalus’ sister, not knowing what fate

held, had given her child to Daedelus for teaching, a

twelve-year-old boy, with a mind hungry for learning.

This child, Perdix, removed fishes’ backbones to study

them; he cut continuous spikes in the spines with a

sharp knife and discovered its use as a saw; and he

was the first to fasten two iron arms onto one vertex,

so that when the bars were evenly set apart, one

arm traced a circle.

But Daedalus envied the boy and threw him

headlong from the sacred citadel of Minerva. Then

he lied that the boy had fallen. But Pallas Athena, goddess

of wisdom, who favors the clever, saved Perdix

and transformed him into a bird and covered him

with feathers in midair. So the vigor that once fed

his genius was transferred to his swift wings and feet.

His name from before, Perdix, remains as the name

of the partridge. However, this bird does not lift its

body on high, nor does it make its nest in branches

and high trees: rather, it flies near to the ground and

places its eggs in bushes. Mindful of its past, it fears far

drops.

8

◆ Fall 2019

Icarus’ flaming fall is a well-known parable,

generally presented as a warning against the foolish ambition

represented by his arrogantly flying too close to

the sun. But Ovid’s myth in its entirety, including the

little-known context of Perdix’s story, transforms typical

images of the principal characters. Icarus becomes a

playful boy who flies too high due to the exhilaration of

flight, while Daedalus is jealous and overreaching, guilty

of killing his nephew and of manufacturing the false

wings that enabled his son’s death.

Yet even with the story of Perdix, Daedelus is

not entirely despicable. He appears to genuinely desire

intellectual distinction, and he achieves mastery as an

artisan and inventor. Yet this desire leads him tragically

astray. What, then, is the distinction between productive

intellectual pursuits, and the destructive desire for preeminence

that dooms Daedalus?

Despite the myth’s age, Daedalus’ overreaching

ambition remains recognizable, particularly at a place

like Yale, where everyone strives for excellence. Just getting

to Yale requires a highly competitive process, and

that competitive pursuit of success continues here, with

countless applications for internships, seminars, and

clubs. Although our ambition might not lead us to throw

our nephew off a citadel or result in the death of our

son, any degree of mastery requires sacrifice — students’

sleep deprivation and overwhelming GCals can attest to

the toll.

While the inventive Perdix displays the beauty

of innovation and genius, Daedalus twists this pure curiosity

with his consuming desire for preeminence. Blinded

to his limitations, Daedelus values his own supremacy

over Perdix’s life, and that murder leads to his exile.

Then, in his attempt to escape, he convinces himself that

he can “make nature new.” But as real as the wings might

appear, and despite his trust in his creation, Daedalus’

work is flawed and finally melts away. He could never

have made Icarus a bird, for no matter his skill, Daedalus

is only human. Icarus was only a playful, curious child

whose entrancement with flight was practically inevitable.

Daedalus begins with genuine knowledge and passion

for his artistry; but once his desire becomes one for

preeminence itself, without heed for his finitude or the

consequences of his actions, he pursues any end to remain

the greatest and to escape his stifling exile.

Our desire for intellectual distinction can both

push us to be our best self and lead us astray. An understanding

of both excellence and humility is necessary to

honor our efforts and passions and prevent them from

crushing us.

Like Perdix, with his “mind hungry for instruction,”

I find that learning is most enjoyable when it is

sought for its own sake. Beyond the pleasure of learning

itself, as a Christian I think that God appreciates

and even encourages intellectual efforts, just as Athena

offers her divine endorsement to Perdix. Furthermore, I

believe that God is Himself the source of that impulse.

Our desire to learn and to create, intellectually or physically,

reflects our being made in the image of God. God’s

preeminent creativity is apparent in the simple beauty of

ochre autumn leaves, or in the more opaque but nonetheless

fascinating principles of organic chemistry. The

divine value of intellectual pursuits is liberating and invigorating,

particularly for students — we ought to and

can acquire knowledge, grow in creativity, and passionately

pursue our interests.

But lest we depend on excellence for satiation,

a certain humility is crucial so that our pursuits do not

become distorted as Daedalus’ desire for preeminence.

Humility is not equivalent to self-deprecation, but rather

entails a healthy recognition of one’s limitations, and of

what is greater than ourselves. Daedalus unsuccessfully

attempts to bring about a metamorphosis of himself and

his son into birds; but unlike Daedalus, the divine Athena

successfully transforms Perdix into a true bird. It often

seems that we can attain an enduring sense of self-worth,

or some sustaining success, through our work and academics,

or other spheres in which we might seek perfection

and preeminence. But I, at least, cannot successfully

manage this. I know that I will fail, whether a slightly

disastrous pop quiz or something of greater significance.

I cannot accumulate achievements that are sufficiently

dependable. When Perdix falls, Athena enfolds him in

feathers, and provides some salvation. Yet even his new

partridge form remains limited — the bird does not lose

its fear, and so it continues to “fl[y] near to the ground

and place its eggs in bushes.”

To me, Christianity offers a more thoroughgoing

and enduring salvation; Christ, in his faultless life and

sacrificial death, covers us with his perfection. As a result,

I do not need perfection and supremacy to establish my

identity or prove my value. And the existence of God

counteracts my hubristic sense that I must or even can

attain some unattainable supremacy — it is, in a sense,

an impulse to make myself a god, comparable to Daedalus’

foolhardy wings. Just as only Athena can make a true

bird, only God can offer me full, lasting perfection and

ultimate excellence.

The elusiveness of preeminence and greatness

are no longer an existential threat when my performance

and distinction do not define my identity or worth. The

ability to pursue knowledge and excellence without the

pressure that my identity is rooted in my success in these

endeavors is quite freeing. That I will inevitably fail, in

ways large and small, is not crushing, and I need not

despair that I am not the best in every (or any) subject.

Though they certainly remain stressful, orgo midterms

do not define me, and I can more readily embark upon

my attempts to muddle through material without that

additional pressure; and classes that are primarily pleasurable

can become all the more so. I can enjoy soaring

through the sky when I have the chance, for when I fall

like Icarus, I know I will not face his end. And unlike Perdix,

I need not “fear far drops” due to past catastrophes.

The knowledge that in God I needn’t and simply cannot

be the best is perhaps the only effective relief I find from

the endless pursuit of ever-fleeting success.

logos ◆ 9

The Promise of Greatness

Raquel Sequeira

I do not have imposter syndrome. When faced with a

peer’s superior achievement or quicker intellect, a simpering

voice in my mind rises to displace the stirring

jealousy. “Remember,” it always whispers, “you are special.”

It doesn’t tell me why I am special or what special

internal quality transcends my external mediocrity. Still,

whenever I examine the roots of motivations and my selfworth,

I find this vague notion of a unique destiny that

sets me apart. My deepest desire is to achieve that destiny,

the greatness I feel sure I was born to achieve. My deepest

fear, barely silenced by the whispering voice within, is

that I really am not special at all.

I suspect that mine is not a universal response

to feelings of inadequacy. Nevertheless, many of us,

perhaps especially when we feel inadequate, harbor a

longing for “greatness” in some area we are passionate

about. “Greatness” is the goal, the distant mountain peak

that we strive for, and which we are capable of reaching

because of some “greatness” already within us — or so

we hope. The greatness we desire, the peak we pursue,

may be admirable. A scientist wants to believe that her

research will eventually contribute to medical advancements

that will save countless lives. A student agonizes

over choosing a major that will prepare him to “make a

difference in the world”. We want the significance of our

lives to extend beyond ourselves — a seemingly selfless

desire that nevertheless creates self-conscious anxiety.

If a God exists who knows every aspect

of the self I am trying to maximize – not

only my limits but also greatness in dimensions

that I never contemplated – then

the way forward is by a commandment so

simple and so difficult that it never made

it onto a stone tablet: “Follow me.”

Many of my friends and I worry to the point of

obsession about what we will do after we graduate. We

look on our four years at Yale as a precious chance to find

a niche in this enormous world where we can maximize

our skills and passions. As it happens, resource optimization

is a Christian virtue as much as a capitalist one:

through a story often called “The Parable of the Talents”

(a fittingly-named ancient currency), Jesus illustrated the

duty to actively invest one’s economic and human capital

to get a return (Matthew 25, Luke 19). However, the

desire to maximize the investments made in me — by

my parents, by society, by God — becomes a crippling

anxiety when I acknowledge the hugeness of that investment.

The thought of my Yale tuition alone makes me

feel guilty for the time I spend on courses and extracurriculars

I know I will never excel in. Whether or not I am

destined for greatness, I owe it.

But is that greatness inherent inside of me,

like a sculpture latent in a stone, or is it a goal for me to

reach, like scaling a mountain? In myself, I see both. My

passions and talents drive me towards a “better world”

that only I can bring about, and that vision of the future

drives me towards full

self-realization. But if

the desire to make a

difference in the world

becomes a means to

this end of self-realization,

then my striving

is ultimately selfish. It

is for the sake of my

own legacy rather than

the good I can do.

Sure enough,

when I examine my

heart, I know that I

don’t just want to be

the best I can be. I

want to be the best

at something. And I

can’t shake the feeling

that there’s something

I was made to do, a

niche only I can fill.

But then a week comes

when the failures hit

too fast and too hard

for me to rally the conviction

that somehow,

by some metric, I am

exceptional. A semester

comes when I feel

like I’ve gone too far

down a path that will

not allow me to make

the most of my life.

The statue within is

cracked, and mediocrity

hits me in the face

like a truck. I am a

jack of all trades and a

master of none, and I

am headed nowhere.

Yet somehow,

even when I am

fully convinced of my

own mediocrity and

non-exceptionality,

my sense of destiny

stubbornly persists.

My existential anxiety

is worse because I still

feel some external

purpose drawing me.

The mountain I seek

is no less real and beautiful just because I feel like I can

never reach it. And I’m right — I can’t. None of us can.

Even if we find our fields of comparative advantage —

the niches we are sculpted to fill — we are left with one

job: to keep increasing our productivity until we die.

Our society sees specialization as the way to reach the

10 ◆ Fall 2019

peak of greatness; in reality, it is a never-ending climb.

I will never reach the top, but I will always fear falling.

Yet though the peak is unreachable, my desire to reach

it — indeed, my belief that I am meant to — is strangely

unwavering and must

be reckoned with.

It may be that my

desire for greatness is

merely a biological drive:

my sense of destiny a trick

of the brain to propel me

forward in the struggle for

survival and dominance.

Or, my desire might mean

something true about reality

and myself. 1 There

might be a different kind

of greatness. To believe

this requires an act of

faith; but the alternative,

that my desire is random

and leads nowhere, I can

only accept as absurd or

tragic then be paralyzed

by pointlessness. Embracing

meaning (and rejecting

absurdity) is the only way

to move with the hope of

a destination. What if my

innate desires for destiny

and greatness — the sculpture

and the mountain

peak, as I imagine them-

-are a promise from one

who knows exactly who I

am and where I am headed?

If a God exists who

knows every aspect of the

self I am trying to maximize

— not only my limits

but also greatness in

dimensions that I never

contemplated — then the

way forward is by a commandment

so simple and

so difficult that it never

made it onto a stone tablet:

“Follow me.” If I believe

God’s promise that

my destiny will be fulfilled,

then I should relinquish

the illusion of control over

that destiny, and with it

my near-sighted striving.

Relinquishing control over

our lives can feel impossible;

yet I believe that this is the way not only to true

greatness, but to deep, abiding rest and freedom from the

anxiety of legacy and self-maximization. Moreover, it is

ultimately a joyful task because it is based on relationship

and trust, not individualism and competition.

There is no objectively complete proof that

faith in my desire as a promise is well-founded, that the

mountain and the sculpture I envision are real. Nevertheless,

I have personally found compelling evidence in

literature, in art, and in my role-models. It seems to me

that lives of true greatness — of self-maximization, external

impact, and sometimes even lasting legacy — are

lives of sacrifice. I don’t mean that greatness is in the

sacrifice itself; I mean that greatness requires relinquishing

our desire for the destiny we envision, sacrificing our

will in obedience, in order to pursue and receive a greater

destiny than we could have imagined. Just as every

destiny is unique, the act of relinquishing that is asked

of each person will be different. And paradoxically, by

serving others above oneself, one’s longed-for destiny is

ultimately realized in unexpected ways. 2 We may find

that investments of our time and resources that seem to

be taking us in the wrong direction — extracurriculars

or classes that don’t add to our resume, time carved out

from study hours to grieve or laugh with a friend — will

shape us in ways we don’t expect.

“The one who pursues righteousness and love

finds life, bounty, and honor” (Prov. 21:22, ESV). I believe

that God will fulfill the promise; God took on flesh

to fulfill it. We will reach the mountain on this earth

because it is our home. The sculpture will take beautiful,

recognizable shape (at least in part) “here in this

life,” as Kierkegaard writes. However, our greatness will

not be defined by a life-saving innovation or discovery,

a paradigm-shifting model, or a transformative work of

art. Even if we achieve such things, they will only be

refractions of greater truth, greater beauty, greater love.

Our true, unearned yet destined greatness, achieved

by relinquishing control and embracing faith, will be a

unique and unconditional identity, an overflowing return

on the investment of our talents for others, and

an unimaginably abundant life. I desire that greatness

more than anything.

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the

Lord,

to the house of the God of Jacob,

that he may teach us his ways

and that we may walk in his paths.”

Isaiah 2:3

1

In her novel Lila, Marilynne Robinson’s title character

asks a preacher, “What do you ever tell people

in a sermon except that things that happen mean

something?” Belief in meaning itself is at the heart

of Christianity.

2

The power of stories is that they expand our “moral

imagination” to recognize the promises fulfilled.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s Johannes de

Silentio tells how Abraham expected God to provide

a lamb to sacrifice in place of Isaac, but God

sent a ram; in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a

king expects to see a statue of his wife as she was

when she died, but finds that the “statue” has aged

as he has. Each must have the eyes to see that this

really is the miracle he has been waiting for.

logos ◆ 11

The Weight of Expectations

Serena Puang

After Dorothy went back to Kansas, the land of Oz descended

into madness, and I was powerless to stop it. The

apple trees decided that they didn’t want to give up their

fruit anymore, so they started stretching their branches

over the main roads in an act of self-protection and gutted

transportation infrastructure in Oz.

A wise man once told me that experience is the

only thing that brings knowledge; I guess I’m “experiencing”

right now, but I don’t feel wiser. I traded my ratty

green sweater for a classy three-piece suit, I’m running

meetings I could have only dreamed of sitting in on a

couple of months ago, but on the inside, I still feel like

the same Scarecrow who spent years fighting to keep the

crows from pecking at my hat, the one who watched in

silence as thousands of passersby debated each other,

wishing I had a brain too.

Not many people are given the opportunity to

rule Oz, and I just want to do it well. No more tricks or

optical illusions, I want to do right by the citizens of Oz:

to truly see them and make each person feel valued, to

create an environment where everyone can succeed —

the wizard certainly didn’t.

“Scarecrow, there are a few individuals requesting

an audience with you,” Tinman says.

“Just a minute,” I reply, “I want to read the

briefing from yesterday before I jump into more meetings.”

“You misunderstand, they’re presently in the

throne room.” he says.

As a little scarebaby, I marveled at pictures of

the Oz throne room. The long curtains that trailed down

from the high ceilings lent an air of mystery, and the gold

siding sparkled in a way that made anyone standing in

the room glow. I remember thinking if only I could belong

here, then nothing else would matter. But now, the

whole room is technically mine, and the too-nice chairs

in the too-nice grand hall bring out the accent colors in

the too-nice wall decor. I’m almost scared to go in because

it feels like I would ruin it.

I take a deep breath and entered through a side

door anyway. Five Munchkins, two flying monkeys, and

seventeen bunnies are crowding around the main entrance.

When they see me, they suddenly charge at the

throne, pushing and shoving to get to the front. I didn’t

even know bunnies lived in Oz.

Three hours later, the monkeys are still screeching

over each other about unemployment in light of the

Wicked Witch of the West’s... recent change of state. The

room lost its illustrious glow about two hours ago, and

the sheer amount of green that permeates every crevice

of the room is about to drive me crazy. The bunnies left

after I agreed to let them sell more carrots to make up for

the lost apples, but the Munchkins and I are still talking

in circles, trying to figure out what to do about the trees.

“We just need to cut them back,” repeats Illad,

self-appointed leader of the group, “Nothing’s going to

get done if they’re on the roads.”

I sigh. If the fighting trees are anything like

the apple trees around my field at home, it might not

make sense to cut them back. They’ll just get angrier and

put down stronger roots. But they must have considered

that, right? Surely I’m not the only one who’s had this

thought... maybe it’s just so obvious that it goes without

saying.

“You need to do something!” another Munchkin

reiterates, “What’s your plan of action?”

“I need to have a talk with the trees before we

move forward — don’t you think?” I say.

There is so much chaos in the room, I can’t

even remember a time people weren’t demanding things

from me. Over everything, I hear my heart racing. It’s

like something is pushing against the sides of my brain,

trying desperately to get out. I wanted to do the best job

I possibly could, which is why I instituted an open door

policy for citizens to voice their concerns, but the amount

of need is overwhelming. Maybe it would be better if I

weren’t the one doing the job at all.

“I thought you were on our side!” Illad exclaims,

“Why can’t you just make your own decisions?

Don’t you have a brain in that thick head of yours?”

“Of course I do!” I scream, “I’m trying my

best! It’s not my fault that you’re all being unreasonable!”

“So much for a ruler that listens and is always

on our side,” Illad snorts, “Let’s go.”

Guilt washes over me as everyone else filed out

of the room with their things. Why did I snap like that?

Tinman comes in with Lion and a list of agenda items.

“How are you doing?” he asks.

I respond, “Completely overwhelmed and out

of my depth,” except for some reason it comes out “Fine.

You?”

He brushes off the question like it was a stray

piece of straw I trailed on the ground, “Did you take the

time to glance over the briefing I sent you?”

“I haven’t had time yet.” I reply apologetically.

“No worries, there isn’t anything that pressing.

As long as you didn’t agree to allow the bunnies sell more

carrots. That would be a disaster.” He pauses to look at

me. “Is something troubling you?” he asks.

“I just... I guess I’m stressed about the whole

tree situation.” I say, tiptoeing around the carrot issue,

“I don’t want to make the wrong decision.”

Lion piped up, “Oh! I understand completely! I

get stressed all the time. You know, like is my mane losing

its shine? Do I do bows or no bows? All you need is to

take a ME-day — it’s self care. Have you tried clearing

12 ◆ Fall 2019

your mind of all your worries?”

“I’m not sure this is the same—”

“Perhaps your mind is too occupied,” Tinman

adds. “Frequent rest is key to a productive and efficient

mind. If you simply set the problem down and return to

it at a later time with a clear head, you’ll likely find that

the solution was there the whole time.”

“Yeah! Sometimes the answer is inside you all

along!” says Lion.

“I guess

you could be right,”

I say weakly.

I know

they’re trying to

help, but they don’t

get it. They seem to

be fitting right into

their new roles, and

even if Lion is a little

dramatic, they

haven’t messed up

like I have. They haven’t

failed Oz.

I’m so lost

in thought, I almost

don’t notice

the man wearing a

sleeveless green button-up

with matching

green pants who

has entered and is

tapping his foot,

waiting for me to

address him — yet

another failure of

the day.

“Can I

help you?” I say in

the most professional

tone I can muster.

“The ruler

of Oz needs a consistent

and reliable

public face. It’s key

to public relations

and stability as you

can probably imagine.

As you learned

during your audience

with him, the Wizard before you used this machine

to create that projection,” the man says, gesturing to the

contraption, hidden behind one of the curtains, which

creates the formidable floating head I’m used to associating

with the Wizard, complete with voice modulation.

“Now, since you, Tinman, and Lion are co-rulers, you

all need to learn to use the projection. It’s a fundamental

part of the job.”

Without pause, the man launches into a long

explanation of each of the dials, knobs, switches, and

levers that control the projection. I try to listen, but I’m

not convinced that we actually need a projection at all.

He says it’s for public relations, but it feels like deception.

When I saw behind the curtain and found out the

Wizard was just an ordinary man from Kansas, I felt

betrayed. I don’t know if I want to or should do that to

someone else, but

maybe this is what

it takes to be a good

ruler. Maybe, if I

nail this, I’ll finally

feel like the legitimate

leader of Oz

everyone expects

me to. Maybe this is

all worth it.

He

demonstrates and

I try to imitate him

exactly, but my feet

don’t glide over

the pedals like his

do. When he does

the projection,

it looks like the

formidable wizard

I’ve admired for

my entire life, but

when I do it, the

smoke comes out in

awkward puffs like

an asthmatic choo

choo train and I

can never get the

voice quite right.

Despite everything,

the man seems to

still believe I can

do it. Each failure

is met with a “Just

try again, you’ll

get it,” or “You’re

obviously capable

of this.” I know

that’s supposed to

be encouraging, but

each one feels like

a weight being stacked on my shoulders, a pressure to

live up to everything this title entails. I start to think that

he’s just saying these things. I may never get this. What

made me think I could ever be better than the wizard?

How can I be a good ruler if I can’t even use the projection?

I try again, and the projection looks like it’s being

operated by a gang of blindfolded flying monkeys

logos ◆ 13

— a lot of moving parts and zero coordination. After

what feels like my fiftieth failed attempt, just looking at

the contraption to think about trying again fills me with

a pang of anxiety. I turn back and realize that Tinman is

still there, patiently waiting so he can have a turn. I step

down and let him try, and of course, he gets it effortlessly

on the first time. I don’t know why I’m surprised, but I

feel my cheeks burn in embarrassment anyway. The task

was easy. I’m the problem. I shouldn’t be here. Tinman

doesn’t say anything, but I know what he’s thinking: I

can’t believe this brainless fool is in charge.

I want to melt into the walls or better yet, return

to the fields I came from. At least there, longing for a

brain felt hopeful. Even as a distant dream, it was something

to cling to. Now I have everything I thought I wanted,

but I’ve never been so unhappy. Before I know what

I’m doing, I start running — even though I know I won’t

get far. I keep going even when I feel my legs go numb

and see the trail of straw I’m leaving behind me. That is,

until I stumble and fall. I look up, face to face with the

apple tree whose roots I just tripped over.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”

“No one does,” the tree replies gruffly. “It’s like

we’re completely invisible.”

“Um... well it’s kind of hard to miss you. You’re

in the middle of the road,” I say.

“That’s not what I mean,” he says slowly. “You

wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me,” I say.

“Everyone in Oz is constantly telling us what

our problem is, but the problem was never really apples.

It’s the fact that no one ever comes to see us unless they

want something. Don’t get me wrong, we want to do our

jobs, we just don’t want that to be the only thing that

gives us value.”

I pause for a moment, unsure of what to say.

“Told you, you don’t understand,” he sighs.

“Well, maybe if we all met together we could

talk it out,” I suggest, but it feels hollow.

He gives me this incredulous look, and suddenly

I regret saying anything at all. I want to say the right

thing to make this all better, but I don’t think that exists.

“We won’t stop,” he says matter of factly. “You

won’t convince me that anything will change.”

I could take him at his word and act accordingly;

I could go in Monday morning and issue a formal

decree recognizing the trees for their contributions to Oz

— no projections, no games, just a legitimate, maybe feeble

attempt to extend an olive branch to a group that is

often overlooked. But that would counter what everyone

else is telling me we have to do: cut them back. There’s

no guarantee that the trees will do anything in response

to us reaching out, and if it fails, even more of Oz will

be mad at me. Despite everything, I think reaching out

to them is right. It’s what we should do, so despite every

fiber of my being that’s screaming at me to wait or to

consult Tinman or to let someone more qualified take

over, I issue the decree right when I get home.

I start with the history of the partnership between

Oz and the trees. With careful attention, I describe

the work they do every day, how Oz wouldn’t function

without them, how grateful we should all be to them. It

seems futile. The trees probably won’t even care.

The next morning, everyone is buzzing around

the throne room before I get there, and once I enter, a

chorus of congratulations greets me.

“Good job!” Lion says enthusiastically, “I knew

you already had the solution.”

“I have to admit, that was really smart of you.

I’m sorry I misjudged you yesterday,” says Illad.

I bury the words that want to leap out of my

mouth next. I didn’t think of anything — I just happened

to be at the right place at the right time, and that was

only because I was completely incompetent at projecting.

I did what anyone would have done.

That night, everyone goes out to dinner to celebrate,

and I try to match the enthusiasm everyone else

seems to have, but it’s hollow. Everything around me is

happening, and I’m just there. I know I still don’t really

belong here. Everyone thinks I’m great now because I

“did something smart,” but I didn’t. Anyone could have

done this, anyone should have done this. I’m so mad

at myself because this is technically what I wanted, but

it still feels like I’m pretending. When the conversation

lulls, I get up and say I have to get home.

“I shall keep you company,” says Tinman, and

we walk out together. “I believe personal congratulations

are in order.”

“I’d really appreciate it if we just didn’t talk

about that.”

“Why is that?” he asks.

“Don’t you see? I stumbled upon that solution.

I didn’t know it would work. It’s not like I was actually

smart or actually thought anything through. It’s not like

I really have a brain; I was just there.”

“I was under the impression that the wizard…”

“He gave me a piece of paper and a title. That

didn’t make me smarter.”

“I thought you were adept enough to realize

that this fixation you have on obtaining a brain severely

misses the point. It’s not a superpower” he says.

“Yeah... I guess. But you do have a brain,” I

shoot back.

He shouldn’t get to tell me that it’s not a big

deal. It is a big deal that everyone else can do something

I can’t. Growing up, I couldn’t stand being the dumbest

person in the room, but what’s worse is the pressure to

pretend that you’re not.

“Why is having a brain so important to you?”

he asks.

“How else am I going to do my job well?”

“I believe you already have.”

14 ◆ Fall 2019

An Ordinary Love

A Reflection by the Logos Masthead

For all its hype, love doesn’t always work out. Christians,

for whom love is the most fundamental truth and mandate,

can say that “love covers a multitude of sins” and

“love is patient, love is kind” (1 Pet. 4:8, 1 Cor. 13:4), but

these verses don’t seem to be a very good remedy for a

broken heart.

While the precise definition(s) of “love” may

warrant extensive discussion, we know love when we encounter

it. It is a deep and powerful force that changes

the way we feel, the way we act, the way we promise. It is

something extraordinary, in the literal sense. Love is patient

and kind but also crushing. It can be tyrannical.

“I envy their happiness who have never loved; how

quiet and easy are they! But the tide of pleasures

has always a reflux of bitterness.” - Peter Abelard

Before love breaks in on our blissfully ignorant

existence, life is reasonable and full of the possibility of

contentment. When it does invade, everything fades to

dark in contrast. The most powerful love feels not only

desirable, but right — so right that nothing can be denied

it, and anything can be justified for its sake. Even when

our conscience tells us that something about this love —

its intensity, its object, its context — may be wrong, love

pushes back: not to love would be wrong. Love seems to

come so close to the divine, sanctifying and exalting its

object.

“When the Best is gone - I know that other things

are not of consequence - The Heart wants what it

wants - or else it does not care -

Not to see what we love, is very terrible - and talking

- doesn’t ease it - and nothing does - but just itself.

I often wonder how the love of Christ, is done - when

that - below - holds - so -“ Emily Dickinson

As divine as it can feel, love is tragically bound

by mortality. The classic love story always features a

happily-ever-after: love’s triumph over seemingly insurmountable

circumstances. But there is no guarantee of

this happily-ever-after in real life. Arbitrary and inevitable

difficulties will tear at relationships, seeming to contrive

against lovers’ perfect union and satisfaction. No union

between people can ever be perfect, thus to be a lover is

to never be satisfied; to be a lover is to face daily tragedy.

“In spite of all my misfortunes, I hoped to find nothing

in it besides arguments of comfort; but how ingenious

are lovers in tormenting themselves!” - Heloise

d’Argenteuil

The one inescapable circumstance of human

life is death. Yet worse than death is having to kill our

loves. In the face of inevitable obstacles, what happens

when unextraordinary ethics challenge love’s tyrannical

rightness? The height of tragedy is the moment of

choice. Agamemnon decides to slay Iphigenia. Cordelia

refuses to profane her love to Lear. Christ says “Your will

be done.” Does one choose to be good, or to be happy?

“The love boat has crashed against the everyday”

- Mayakovsky

Sometimes the choice is widely agreed upon by

society: monogamy is preferable, while restrictions on sex

and gender are now almost unthinkable. The struggle

raging in our hearts is rarely so clear. If I love someone

I cannot be with, why does it sear my lungs? Because I

feel that this capricious, tragic love is something extraordinary.

I feel that the love that is opposed to life also transcends

life. But I know I am wrong.

“I incessantly seek for you in my mind; I recall your

image in my memory; and in such different disquietudes

I betray and contradict myself. I hate you: I

love you. Shame presses me on all sides: I am at this

moment afraid lest I should seem more indifferent

than you, and yet I am ashamed to discover my trouble.

How weak are we in ourselves, if we do not support

ourselves on the cross of Christ.” - Peter Abelard

The Christian claim is that ethics and happiness

are compatible in Christ, no matter how seemingly at

odds. If love and justice meet at the cross, where is the

hope for the unjust lover? I am trying to believe in the

ordinariness of extraordinary love. We fall in love given

the right circumstances, the right time, and in the most

unexpected of ways — only our finitude is what makes

love special and extraordinary in this place and time. But

the hope of the resurrection is that somehow, all ordinary

loves will be made extraordinary. At such a time, the most

extraordinary, mind-blowing, heart-breaking earthly love

will be no more or less divine than other, simpler loves.

When they rise from the dead, they neither marry

nor are given in marriage, but they are like the angels

in heaven. - Mark 12:5

This, I think, is the hope of an ordinary love:

that we can look at our extraordinary loves and believe

that they will be made abundant. It means that we can

temper love’s tyranny because this isn’t the last or even the

best of it. It means that when the ethical crashes into the

love boat, it need not sink, but can expand to include the

ethical. It means that mortal life need not stand opposed

to love.

“I love you as I did on the first day - you know that,

and I have always known it, even before this reunion.”

- Hannah Arendt

logos ◆ 15

To Want to Want: Desiring Differently

Jason Lee

Sometimes I’ll look up from lunch and wish I liked math.

This is different from wishing I was good at math. As it

is, I’m perfectly fine being remarkably average. What I

mean is that sometimes I wish math was as beautiful to

me as it to the people who love it. Somewhere past the

point where numbers become Greek lies the internal,

ticking logic of the universe that I imagine is what pushes

them to slog through things called combinatorics or

“Boolean” whatever.

But while I know I’m missing some sort of

splendor behind the polynomial veil, I’m stopped by the

unfortunate fact that math bores me. So I kind of want

it, but not really. There’s a distance between me, a person

who wants to see lovely and evocative things, and a desire

for this particular lovely and evocative thing. I almost

have the desire, but not quite.

This is odd, but not uncommon. Exercise is another

example of this in which we all know that running

— or jogging, hopping, or picking things up and putting

them down again — in the long run will make us healthy,

which we want. But for various reasons we don’t do any

of these activities. Eating poorly and staying up late are

related examples in that, right now, we want to do both

— fast fried food tastes good, and there’s a curious sense

of pride and/or solidarity in working until predawn

— but we wish we didn’t. Next to all our wantings and

not-wantings, there appears to be a second category of

desire in which we want to want or, alternatively, we want

to not want.

Academics sometimes call this “wanting-towant”

a second-order desire or metadesire. I do not want

to do math, but I know there’s an arithmetic wonder for

those who count it all out, so in recognition of that, I

want to want to do math. Once recognized, metadesires

pop up everywhere (see: procrastination — we want to

punt the p-set that’s really just the same problem repeated

seven times, but we wish we didn’t).

So then, what to do about this, not new, but

maybe newly attended to set of wants? We may as well

start where we do with our more immediate cravings,

which is to say, rank them. We do this almost instinctively

with our regular wants. Our desire for learning (or

maybe just a diploma) outweighs our desires for things

incompatible with the demands of college, such as free

time, or a disposable income. Over learning, we value

our identities and our self-worth.

In the same way, maybe our want to want to

exercise lies above our want to want to listen to country

music. That seems to make sense: fitness can be its own

reward, whereas country — country can wait. But then,

shouldn’t we value finding, or rather, learning beauty in

all things above being able to lift unreasonably heavy objects?

That’s not a fair comparison. But whether we do or

don’t, what I’m trying to ask is: why?

There appears to be a standard or purpose by

which we have ordered our desires, even if we did not

consciously subscribe to one. There are a thousand and

one such standards, whether altruism, God, or I-justwant-to-be-happy,

and all offer many ways to prioritize,

but also filter, our desires. If this standard, or “The

Point” is our own happiness, we pull our great tangle of

wants into order based on what drives us to joy. Maybe

eating terrific cuisine tops that list, or making gobs and

gobs of money, or living by the coast while others are cast

aside.

By ranking and pursuing these immediate desires

we can take steps towards our Point. At the same

time, we also put together a set of metadesires, which

by nature are more oriented towards the future. Alongside

desires fitted to who we are right now, there exists a

class of metadesires that pertain to self-transformation,

to who we want to become.

Maybe that sounds a little grandiose. And in a

way it is grandiose, ambitious, and plain difficult to accept

— not to mention achieve — the project of self-improvement.

After all, there’s been more than enough

research demonstrating sturdy links between CO2 ppm

and meat production, refrigerators, and palm oil to provoke

some lifestyle changes with the recognition of “caring

about the planet” as a worthy desire in line with our

Point. Yet for some reason, that recognition isn’t enough.

Even if we only consider those who have the funds to

enact such lifestyle changes, my favorite dish is short rib

stew, yours is ice cream cake and we both use semi-cheap

soaps. Sometimes, our resolve to pursue improvement is

simply too weak. Within certain margins of nuance, we

don’t want to protect the environment: we want to want

to.

In combination with our own earnest efforts,

He will grant us the resolve and the

capacity we lack to deny our misleading

(which for me means un-Godly but could

also be called counterproductive) desires

and help us become worthy of the Point

that He has set before us.

It is here that our metadesires of self-improvement

become achingly relevant. On some level, our

metadesires reveal a lack: of resolve, of foresight, of willpower,

of vision, of stamina, or of tenacity in ourselves.

There’s a sense in which we want to become ready, or

maybe worthy of our Point before we take it on. If our

Point is to protect and empower people, we must first

want to fight by all means for the planet, to acknowledge

the homeless, or even just be academically responsible

and start papers prior to their due date. If we ignore the

project of self-improvement fueled by these transformative

metadesires, then the Point is not only out of our

16 ◆ Fall 2019

Guy up there who not only

created the world, but has a

particular way in which He’d

like us to live in it. Not because

He’s picky, but because He

knows His Point for us will be

larger and broader and more

fulfilling for us, the people He

loves, than any other.

This is not to say that such a

life will not be difficult. God

knows it will at times seem just

as complicated and confusing

as all the other Points. In fact,

Paul, the author of several

books of the Bible, explicitly

acknowledges in his letter to

the Romans the difficulty of

metadesire, self-improvement,

and general existence in this

way:

reach, but out of our pursuit. If we don’t value metadesires

as part of our Point, if we are always waiting to be

prepared for our desires rather than letting our metadesires

prepare us, then there’s no reason to seek anything

more than what we are already capable of, to desire anything

more than what we already know, or to be more

than we already are.

But if we do attend to them, our desires for

transformation help us not to just pursue “feeling good,”

but health, and not just health but wholeness. They guide

us beyond I-just-want-to-be-happy to a timeless happiness

that may be called satisfaction, or even peace. They

push us not just to live well or be compassionate, but to

be good, the best we can be. Wholeness, peace, goodness,

which can be called righteousness: these are enduring,

one might say eternal desires that prepare us for our

Point as much as they push us to it.

At the same time, it makes sense to be wary

of these types of metadesires. After all, we don’t know

where they come from, and sorting the origins of desire

like trying to unmix paint. Maybe these projects of

self-improvement as I’ve defined them are just the result

of social pressure, conditioning, and overactive community

instincts. Maybe it is efficient or biologically sound to

pursue certain desires, even if, for some reason, we don’t

feel the desire itself. Maybe they’re a burrowing side effect

of a consumerist culture that is constantly telling us

to want things that we don’t currently want. The resulting

wariness is paralyzing; if we can never parse the roots

of our desires, how do we know we’re not wasting our

time, or worse, being made fools of ?

It is in this uneasiness that I and other believers

turn to faith. As Christians, we believe that there’s a Big

“I do not understand

what I do. For what I

want to do I do not

do, but what I hate I

do … For I have the

desire to do what is

good, but I cannot

carry it out. For I do not do the good I want

to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I

keep on doing” (Romans 7:15-19, NIV).

In response, we’re promised that God will help us along

the way. In combination with our own earnest efforts,

He will grant us the resolve and the capacity we lack to

deny our misleading (which for me means un-Godly but

could also be called counterproductive) desires and help

us become worthy of the Point that He has set before us.

If this is true, then resolve can be trained and

morality practiced. We can try to do it on our own, or

with those we trust. It could be that the desires of self-improvement

promoted by the Bible are the only way to live

a fulfilling life. The exact way we live and the goals we

set for ourselves seem to be matters of faith. For those

who say, “that’s good for you, but I don’t really need it,”

I understand. In fact, I’ll be honest in saying that even

if we believe them to be promoted by a holy text, we’re

not always sure how our professed metadesires will get us

where we need to be.

One simple response to this uncertainty is that if

there is a person or method or series of poems that some

believe to be inspired and effective in helping them get

to where they want to be, it seems odd not to look there.

But more importantly, the Christian message is that in

our doubt, in our uncertainty, we’ve chosen to believe the

word of an unwavering, divine, bigger-than-capitalism

God. Rather than rely on what we know — which, as

we’ve discussed, is often so, so little — we’ve chosen to

humble ourselves in faith. To keep living in that humility

is the Point.

logos ◆ 17

A Dialogue on Desire at Durfee’s

Ben Colon-Emeric

Joan: Hey, Max! How are you doing? Making the old

Durfee’s run, I see.

Max: Yeah, I was too busy to get lunch. I have a bunch of

internship applications I’m working on.

Joan: Relatable!

Max: I feel like there’s a lot of pressure on me to make the

most of my time. I don’t really want to work this summer,

but I want to have an internship under my belt.

Joan: Why?

Max: If you’re doing STEM, especially medicine, you

need to do research at some point or else you fall behind

everyone else.

Joan: So you’re saying you want to be as good as everyone

else?

Max: Well yes, it’d be strange if I didn’t.

Joan: What do you mean?

Max: If I see that someone is more successful than me at

something, I want to improve so that I can be as good as

they are. It’s normal.

Joan: Is it normal though? You’re saying that you see

someone succeeding and want to be like them so that you

can feel better about yourself; isn’t that envy?

Max: I don’t think so. Look at the classic Ten Commandments

idea of envy, the “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s

air pods” sort of thing. That is about actual things

that can be owned. For all of those things, if I have them,

my neighbor does not. If I choose to get an internship because

everyone else is getting internships, there is no material

loss to anyone; everyone wins.

Joan: That feels like a really narrow definition of envy.

Envy does not need to involve a loss for whomever you are

envying. By getting an internship, you are trying to remove

your sense of being inferior to people who get internships.

Even though you don’t directly take anything away that

they own, you are still establishing an antagonistic relationship

by trying to place them beneath you; this is still

envy.

Max: So give me your definition

of envy, then.

Joan: Envy is the state of desiring what someone has simply

because they have it and you don’t. Take your situation,

for instance. You already said that you don’t really

want to get an internship for its own sake — you want it

because other people are getting internships and you don’t

want to fall behind. If people around you didn’t have internships,

you wouldn’t desire an internship. Therefore,

your desire for an internship is envious.

Max: I spy a problem.

You say that if I want

something because

others have it, it is envy.

But then that seems to

regard all forms of imitation

as envy.

Joan: No it doesn’t.

You can do what others

do, so long as you

do not do it just because

others are doing

it.

Max: That doesn’t

work though. Let’s say

that it’s winter, and it’s

bitterly cold. I see you

wearing a nice wooly

scarf. I say to myself,

“Wow, she looks warm

in that nice scarf. I

want to be as warm

as she is; I should get

a scarf.” Before seeing

you, I didn’t understand

the benefits of

scarves for warmth;

I thought they were

pointless.

Joan: I mean, they are

pretty pointless.

Max: But seeing how

comfortable you are

with your scarf makes

me want to achieve a

similar state of comfort.

By your definition, this would be envy, but I think we

can agree that I am justified in my desire to be warmer.

Joan: That’s an interesting point, but it’s a different kind

of desire than your situation with the internship. In that

example, there’s a comparison between you and the other

people that is absent from the scarf example. With the

18 ◆ Fall 2019

scarf, you don’t care if you’re warmer or colder than me,

you just want to be warm. In your case, the internship matters

only insofar as it changes your status in comparison to

someone else. Your desire is envious because it stems from

that comparison.

Max: I don’t buy that. It wouldn’t be envious if I said that I

want to be like you because you are better than me.

Joan: It’s nice to hear

you say that.

Max: Don’t flatter

yourself, it’s a thought

experiment.

Joan: Well, as much as

I like your statement,

there’s still a problem

with it. The phrase

“I want to be like you

because you are better

than me” can go two

ways. It could mean

that you are using me

as an exemplar. People

do this all the time;

that’s why people look

to the lives of the saints

for inspiration or read

biographies of inspirational

figures. Seeing

virtue and wanting to

emulate it is good. But

your statement could

just as easily mean that

you want to be like me,

who is better than you,

because you do not

want to be worse than

me.

Max: I don’t see the

distinction.

Joan: It’s a matter of

motive. You want to

be like the saints because

the saints are

good, and you want to

be good. But you want to be like the students who have

internships because you do not want them to be better

than you. The first is a desire to be a better, holier person,

which is good. The latter is the desire to feel better about

yourself by placing yourself above others, which is bad.

To distinguish between those two forms of “I want to be

like you because you are better than me,” you need to add

another clause.

Max: So it becomes “I want to be like you because you are

better than me, and I want to be good,” versus, “I want to

be like you because you are better than me so that I will

not be less good than you anymore.” The first is good, the

second is envy.

Joan: That’s it exactly.

Max: So the envy is not my act of desiring an internship

that others have. The envy is entirely in my motivation for

that desire.

Joan: That seems like a solid working definition.

Max: The problem is, of course, how do you improve your

desires? How do I train myself to stop wanting to not be

inferior to other people?

Joan: I like that you used the word “train”; that’s very Aristotelian

of you.

Max: Your year of DS rears its ugly head.

Joan: Sure, but it’s super applicable in this case. Aristotle

believed that virtues needed to be practiced in the same

way we think about our bodies. To reach peak physical

fitness, you need to work out a lot until exercising becomes

a habit. To reach peak moral rightness, you need to constantly

make sure you’re acting morally so that eventually

you reach the point where acting morally becomes instinctive.

I think it’s the same here. To make sure you don’t

want things from a place of envy, you need to examine

why you want the things you want. Eventually, you’ll instinctively

avoid wanting things for the wrong reasons. It

has to be an ongoing process.

Max: That makes sense. I have to be constantly critical of

my reasons for wanting things until I get into the habit of

wanting things for the right reasons. I should still go for the

internship, but I need to get myself out of the mentality

that I need to do it because others are doing it. I need to

shake the desire to not be inferior.

Joan: Pretty much.

Max: That’s a lot of work.

Joan: Yes it is.

Max: Well there you have it.

Joan: Now go and fill out those applications.

Max: All the while scrutinizing my motives for doing so.

Joan: I mean, doesn’t every application ask you why you

want to be a part of whatever it is you’re applying for?

Max: You’ve got me there. Alright, I’ll see you later.

Joan: See ya!

logos ◆ 19

Thoughts on Catholic Liturgy and Expressive Individualism

Jadan Anderson

The rhythm of the Catholic Mass is silent. I remember

from my childhood. But after a few rounds of

standing and kneeling, calling and responding, listening

and reading, and standing and kneeling again you

latch onto the beat. You start to feel it first when you

fall to the kneelers. Then it’s in the page turns. Then

it inhabits the rumble of the congregation’s chants. It’s

overwhelming, and you are mildly terrified of sitting

down a moment too late or singing the hymn too

fast or stumbling over too many words of the Nicene

Creed. Your own beat just cannot keep the same time;

so, you stifle it. You are part of the mass but struggle

to find yourself in it.

This liturgy, the structure through which

the congregation is meant to worship, meant to be

reminded of the beautiful mystery of their faith, was

suffocating. The homilies were monotonous. I felt that

if I was here to praise God, I should do so the way I

wanted. If I wanted to clap my hands, I should. If I

wanted to dance around, I should. If I wanted to stand

when everyone else kneeled, I should. But to deviate

from the ritual meant to disrupt others and embarrass

myself. So, I went through the motions. In doing so,

sincerity was lost to tradition’s rigidity, mass lacked

integrity, and, despite reciting the psalms and singing

the hymns, the rhythm of the Catholic mass remained

silent and so did I.

I arrived at Yale eager to replace ritual with

all new things. Behind the tropes about college being

a time to discover ourselves and craft our future is the

implicit assertion that this will all be done away from

home, free from the influence or command of liturgical,

familial, or even cultural ritual. It’s a major selling

point; it’s a promise. With this scope and freedom,

discover what you really want, learn who you really

are, grow into yourself. While this yearning to know

ourselves is innocent and noble — it is the key to

honest self-expression, and self-expression is beautiful

— the promise falls short.

When in my first year I tried to parse through

all that I thought I wanted, I found a mess of tangled

up, contradictory hopes and ambitions. I found

ephemeral ideas of a future self, some of whose origins

were almost unknown to me. Without the grounding

knowledge of my own desires, which were more fickle

and fragile that I had previously thought, I wasn’t sure

where to turn for the answer to the question, “Who

am I?”

Filled with this unexpected and disappointing

doubt, I found myself one night on Park Street in a

10:00 PM service at Saint Thomas More. Mass began.

The rhythm had not changed. It was still structured

and rigid, silent and pervasive. My beat still didn’t

keep time.

But then it did. Abruptly, the two rhythms

became one. Mine was completely the Mass’s and the

Mass’s completely mine. What was once suffocating

was no longer. I still felt the rhythm surrounding me,

in the falling and the chanting and the turning. But it

became intuitive, natural, liberating because I trusted

that the beat would ground me. The rhythm, always

silent, remained silent, and so did I. Yet self-consciousness

gave way to a long-awaited sense of self.

When I parsed through all that I thought

I wanted, I found a mess of tangled up,

contradictory hopes and ambitions. I

found ephemeral ideas of a future self,

some of whose origins were almost

unknown to me. Without the grounding

knowledge of my own desires, which

were more fickle and fragile that I had

previously thought, I wasn’t sure where

to turn for the answer to the question,

“Who am I?”

The moment those two rhythms become one

holds the essence of liturgy. It’s about this essence that

Luke pens in his gospel, “For whoever wishes to save

his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My

sake, he is the one who will save it” (Luke 9:24, New

American Standard Version). Of all the great paradoxes

of the Christian faith — Jesus as fully God and

fully human, the Trinity, the resurrection of the dead

— this one is no less incredible. You want to find your

true self ? Die to yourself. Trade in your will for God’s

will. Trust that He will return to you a truer and better

self than any version concocted out of jealous ambition

or misguided filial obligation or even innocent yet

short-sighted dreaming. The claim sounds outlandish.

Many might say it sounds repulsive.

Identity is one of the things we hold most

dear. There exists a universal desire to know oneself

and be known to others, and with it, the cry of

expressive individualism. For the expressive individualist,

fulfillment is achieved “through the definition

and articulation of one’s own identity” (Levin, Yuval.

The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social

Contract in the Age of Individualism. New York: Basic

Books, 2017). That identity is found in the pursuit of

that which is desired, so long as the desire is authenti-

20 ◆ Fall 2019

cally one’s own, as the best manifestation of one’s true

self. Expressive individualism maintains that since only

the individual knows and can discern her desires, only

the individual has the power to define herself.

The Christian also seeks fulfillment through

identity. However, she rests knowing that the definition

and revelation of true identity comes thankfully not

from herself and her desires but from God and only

God. This Christian idea is repulsive at first glance

because it willingly takes the power of self-definition

away from the self. This

seems to fly in the face

of expressive individualism

by opposing

mainstream conceptions

of authenticity and

undermining freedom

of choice. And it does,

but not in totality. The

choice is, to where or to

whom we turn to look

for ourselves.

The rhythms

became one when I

chose to participate in

the liturgy, to let my

worship be formed. As

Luke’s passage suggests,

you choose to surrender

yourself not to your

desires but to God’s; for

the promise — backed

by a God who claims

perfect constancy, unlike

my inconsistent desires

— is that at the end of

it all, our true selves will

be illuminated.

The rhythms

became one when I

realized that where the

mass’s beat rested, my

own could fill in. There exists a “living space of freedom

between each commanding beat” (Arendt, Hannah.

The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt,

Brace & World, 1985). The capacity for expression,

for personality, is not forgone. It is highlighted by the

steady, external structure, like watercolor seeping just

outside of definitive lines, or a riff floating between the

notes of a melody.

The rhythms became one when I allowed

liturgy to challenge the idea that authenticity is only

the work of one pair of hands. Expressive individualism

makes knowing oneself an isolated endeavor, prior

to relationships with others. The Christian idea is that

the expressive individualists have it out of order. You

cannot really know yourself before you go to others;

you go to the Other in order to know yourself. Authenticity,

then, is a relational project, not an insular

one. And like any relational project, it requires both

the relinquishing of power and the decision to trust.

As for the decision of what structure or philosophy

or God to trust, that is the reader’s decision. I have

come to follow C.S. Lewis’s line of thinking when he

writes, “The more we let God take us over, the more

truly ourselves we become — because He made us. He

invented us. He invented all the different people that

you and I were intended

to be” (Lewis, C.S. Mere

Christianity. New York:

Walker & Co., 1987).

Looking outside

of oneself in search of

one’s true self seems

counterintuitive. But

parallels exist outside

of the experience of a

Catholic mass. When is

the last time you went

to a party or to a club?

Toad’s Place, perhaps?

Do you remember wedging

yourself through to a

comfortable spot on the

dance floor? The rhythm

of the music likely

complemented the chaos

around you. It may have

been hard at first to

catch the beat. But you

do, and before you know

it you’ve spent two hours

swaying — or jumping

— to songs you can’t

even remember. Time

passed by so quickly. You

lost yourself to the beat.

But you were at home in

the beat. Content in the

beat. Yourself in the beat.

A better parallel is dancing with another person.

When was the last time you were led in a dance

with a partner? Intimately? Not necessarily romantically,

just intimately — a dance in which give-and-take

ruled your steps, in which you had to resist the impulse

to control lest the both of you trip over each other.

When you trust the leading partner to lead, provided

they are experienced, the dance becomes fluid. Intuitive.

Natural. As it should be. Hours, again, are lost

to it. And though your control is lost to your partner’s

steps, the dance is good. The dance is yours.

logos ◆ 21

Delaying Satisfaction: When Tomorrow Never Comes

Bradley Yam

The Desires of a Yalie

When John and I sat down under the beautiful beams

of Berkeley’s Dining hall to swap stories about our novel

and wondrous versions of The Yale Experience, from

talks by celebrity academics on Quantum Computing

to otherworldly jazz concerts, we knew we were at the

peak of privilege. Our conversation was charged with

awe, but also an accompanying anxiety to make the

most of our time here. Out of the blue, John asks, “But

really, are you satisfied?”

Grateful? Gratified? Bedazzled? Surely all of

the above. But satisfaction lies just around the corner.

This is the time of our lives, the time to move fast and

break things, to make our mistakes. Deans, professors

and parents assure us as anxious first-years on the

green that we have “made it”, but it seems like the only

thing we have made is an opportunity, an opportunity

for more. I thought the point of it all was exactly not to

be satisfied, but in the fashion of Tennyson’s Ulysses,

to seek, to strive, and not to

yield to the specter of

contentment.

Every year,

articles appear in

the Yale Daily News critiquing, discussing and reflecting

on Yalies’ complicated relationship with work and success.

With titles like “The Golden Ticket” and “What’s

the Point of a Yale Education?” they strike at the very

heart of Yale’s meritocratic ambitions. Working too

hard (and often working at a student income contribution

too) is often the subject of such critiques. Yale’s

workaholism seems to mirror a broader American

trend as described in Derek Thompson’s The Atlantic

article, “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable”.

For Yalies and Americans alike, so much of life’s purpose,

meaning, and joy seems to depend on work.

But Yalies also recognize that life is not all

about work, that our all-consuming desire for success

must be mitigated and tempered by caring for our human

needs: we seek friendship, love, leisure, or simply

good food and a place to chill. The university has responded

with mindfulness activities, the Good Life

Center, mental health resources and more, which is a

classically Yale-way of trying to solve a problem by resourcing

it. Nevertheless, we’ve begun to come out of

workaholism by realizing that satisfaction in life must be

more holistic.

Gratification vs Satisfaction?

We might have gratified our desires, our holistic human

needs, but it’s questionable whether we’ve gotten to the

heart of satisfying them. On average, we find time to

go out with friends, eat healthy meals, and attend yoga

classes. We are, for the most part, just fine. These “wellness

strategies” have helped to reduce burnout, but

that can’t be all we hope for in life: to be just functional

enough to manage the crazy high stresses of Yale life. Is

this all that it means to take care of ourselves?

To answer that, we have to ask: What’s the

difference between gratification and satisfaction? Gratification

merely appeases desire: it meets desire just

enough that we are able to put it out of our minds.

Gratification quenches desire with a substitute object.

On the other hand, satisfaction does not quench desire,

but actually intensifies it; it allows one to revel in the

mere fact of having experienced something so desirable

and thereby “completes” the desire. Desire that is

completed does not vanish, it is transformed. Gratification

is to satisfaction what take-out fast food is to a fivecourse

meal; it’s a one-night stand to a life-long loving

relationship; it’s “that’ll do” to “that’s exactly what I

wanted!” Desire that is satisfied transforms into a deep

and lasting joy, even if its object has come and gone.

Satisfaction asks not for desire’s repetition.

“The experience had been so complete that

repetition would be a vulgarity - like asking

to hear the same symphony twice in a day.” -

Perelandra, C.S. Lewis

22 ◆ Fall 2019

The ability to delay gratification has been

widely shown to correlate to higher educational attainment

and general success in life. It seems predictable

that Yalies, an extremely selective student body handpicked

by a rigorous admissions process, would take this

ability to delay gratification to the n th degree: not simply

choosing to delay our immediate wants, we attain the

ability to delay satisfaction for our ultimate and deepest

desires. In the elaborate balancing act that we perform

on a daily basis both work and leisure have been instrumentalized,

for the sake of someday satisfying our desires,

while getting by through gratifying some of them

now. Satisfaction lies just around the corner.

Our longing for love, for novelty, for well-being

is gratified rather than satisfied. We have accepted that

for now, gratification is acceptable, for now, we’ll settle

for pleasantries instead of conversation, for now, we’ll

have a quick lunch instead of a feast. But delaying satisfaction

comes at a cost. Gratification may conceal a

compulsivity, a perfectionism, even a workaholism, just

by keeping us sane and functional. It may also conceal

something more important and more terrifying: the answer

to Slavoj Žižek’s question, “How do we know what

we desire?”

Delaying Satisfaction

Delaying satisfaction is insidious because it allows us to

perpetually put off the true quest for the heart’s desire.

The way this works is apparent when compared to delayed

gratification. Delaying gratification has a clearly

defined end, and once that end is fulfilled, our wants

can be gratified. For instance, I’m not going to watch

The Good Place on Hulu because I need to finish this article

in time for print. But once the article is done, I

can binge watch all the Hulu and Netflix I want. In

contrast, delayed satisfaction has no clearly defined end

because the question of satisfaction is itself the question

“What are my true ends?” Delaying satisfaction means

never confronting our deepest desires.

I believe that the demand Christianity

makes on all of us is to seek the satisfaction

of the heart’s deepest desire, and to

seek it now. This is a surprisingly

reasonable demand.

The combination of delayed satisfaction (always

putting off the big questions) with the profound resources

of gratification (doing just enough to take care

of ourselves) makes for a potent trap. It makes us feel

purposeful and functional, but it makes it too easy to

never truly interrogate our desires, to go along with the

flow, to assume that the objects of our all-consuming

desire (however nebulous they may be, don’t worry, we

are told, we will “figure it out”) will — must — satisfy

us. Eventually.

I am no stranger to this maze. I convinced myself

that working 100-hour weeks was feasible and necessary

for the sake of getting a meaningful and fulfilling

job. I made sure I blocked out meal times with friends,

a weekend or two for get-aways and buffets at Sushi

Palace, and I tried to adopt daily routines of prayer and

a yearly fast during Lent. These were all undoubtedly

positive things, but the spirit of delayed satisfaction and

optimization ruled me entirely. I was meeting my most

important present wants, I was gratifying my desires,

but satisfaction was always looming tomorrow. I was always

hoping that I would go to bed and wake up and

find that I had somehow, magically, arrived. But I never

asked myself where I hoped to arrive at. John asked,

“But really, are you satisfied?”, then our lunch hour was

up. But his question haunted me.

What if tomorrow never comes? What if the

act of placing our hope for deepest joy and truest happiness

— for satisfaction — in some ambiguous future

state is surely to sabotage and condemn that satisfaction?

The Christian “Impatience”

It comes as no surprise that the resources that Yale offers

to counterbalance workaholism involve practices

with spiritual roots, for the issue of satisfaction is traditionally

and ultimately a spiritual question. This is an

essential quality of true self-care that is lost in the process

of secularization.

The Christian spirituality and doctrine regarding

satisfaction is strange, but refreshing. It demands

that we pursue our highest goods immediately, impudently,

almost impatiently, like a child might stamp his

feet for his mother or father. It defies the doctrine of

delayed satisfaction. The Christian is commanded to

ask and then be answered, to knock and for the door to

be opened, to seek expecting to find, and she’s asked to

do it all right now.

This only makes sense in light of the Christian

truth that our highest good cannot be achieved,

it can only be received, and it must be received today

and every day. Hence we pray, “Give us today our daily

bread” (Matthew 6:11, New International Version).

Jesus tells his disciples an amusing story about an impatient

friend. A man knocks incessantly at his friend’s

door, late in the middle of night, to get some food for

his guests. His friend gets up, obviously annoyed, but

satisfies his request — not because of their friendship,

but because of the urgent and unceasing knocking!

I believe that the demand Christianity makes

on all of us is to seek the satisfaction of the heart’s

deepest desire, and to seek it now. This is a surprisingly

reasonable demand. Only Christianity insists that our

satisfactions must be sought now, even if all our desires

may not be immediately fulfilled. It asks us to confront

the tragedy of desiring deeply and perhaps being disappointed,

but being sure of what we truly desire. The

proper name for this kind of satisfaction and simultaneous

dissatisfaction is joy. Joy persists whether desires

are fulfilled or delayed. The call of Christ on the cross

is not one of immediate satisfaction, and not one of

delayed satisfaction, but a call to bravely, humanely, and

sensitively face the tragedy of our lost longings, our inconsolable

desires, our most powerful pinings. Only in

our present yearnings can we discover what we truly,

truly desire.

logos ◆ 23

The Distance from Here to Paradise: Restoring Community

Sharla Moody

What is – “Paradise”

by Emily Dickinson

What is – “Paradise” –

Who live there –

Are they “Farmers” –

Do they “hoe” –

Do they know that this is “Amherst” –

And that I – am coming – too –

Do they wear “new shoes” – in “Eden” –

Is it always pleasant – there –

Won’t they scold us – when we’re hungry –

Or tell God – how cross we are –

You are sure there’s such a person

As “a Father” – in the sky –

So if I get lost – there – ever –

Or do what the Nurse calls “die” –

I shan’t walk the “Jasper” – barefoot –

Ransomed folks – won’t laugh at me –

Maybe – “Eden” a’n’t so lonesome

As New England used to be!

“What is — ‘Paradise’ — [?]” asks Emily Dickinson

in the first line of one of her many poems. Today, her

question resounds. All of us, whether religious or not,

have formed an idea of Paradise in our minds. Paradise

is a place where justice reigns, where we have a home,

where we are content — the world is in order and all of

our desires have been met.

Our design for Paradise, though, is often shaped

by what we lack in our present conditions. Dickinson centers

her poem on this sentiment and longs for a Paradise

that alleviates the pains of her present circumstances. For

the jobless, Paradise is a state of stable employment; for

the ignorant, Paradise is knowledge; for the lonely, Paradise

is community. While idealized versions of Paradise

may differ from person to person, their roots remain the

same: Paradise is a place where all our present negatives

are turned positive.

Dickinson divides the poem into three different

settings: the past, represented by Eden, the present,

depicted by Amherst, and the future, presented as Paradise.

This temporal structure presents Paradise as a place

where desire is fulfilled. “Eden” evokes the memory of

perfection. In our own lives we often idealize the distant

past and childhood as seasons of perfect contentedness.

Yet when ruminating on childhood recently with my

brother and expressing a wish that I could return to that

“better” time, he reminded me that I had faced my own

share of problems then, though I did not fully understand

their gravity or perhaps lacked the skills to process

them. Our pasts are seldom truly “simpler times”, are

often more difficult than the idealized versions we have

created in our minds. This recognition should impress on

us that what we consider important is often unique to our

present moment, not fundamental to who we are. How

quickly we forget the temporal specificity of ourselves!

How emptily we define identity according to whether

our wants are met.

Nevertheless, the sentiment of a simpler time is

a seductive one that clearly captivates Dickinson. For her

speaker, Eden represents a time of perfection, when the

problems of the present do not yet exist. Eden is “pleasant”,

juxtaposed with Amherst, which is “lonesome” and

unfriendly, where people “laugh at me”, “scold us”, and

are “cross”. The personal past always appears perfect, at

least in hindsight clouded by the dilemmas of today. We

forget the harsh realities from days prior when we live in

harsh realities today. To really consider a place like Eden,

whose nature is perfection, is so far beyond our realm of

understanding that we label some distant past as perfect.

This glossing-over of history, though, implies a craving to

experience real perfection. Our memories are misleading:

We are not satisfied in our current states. Either our

past desires were never fulfilled, leading to dissatisfaction,

or those desires have been fulfilled but were so momentary

that they bring us no enduring joy. In high school,

my English teacher tasked us with writing letters to our

future selves, to be received at graduation. I remember

being so dumbfounded by what I had written, that sophomore-year-Sharla

had been so concerned with a quiz

coming up. This quiz didn’t really matter in the long run,

and so many desires are similarly highly temporal; of a

worry for such an infinitesimal fraction of life that we

wonder why they really bothered us.

At the time I’m writing this article, my present

concerns are making sure that I finish my p-set by the

end of the week and figuring out my transportation to

the airport for the next break. Resolving these problems

will not have a lasting effect on my long-term future or

on my happiness, and this is often true of our desires.

This relative insignificance may be hard to discern in the

present, as every concern ultimately does impact us: If I

fail to turn in my p-set at all, I may do poorly in my class

and face consequences related to jobs later, or if I miss

my flight I may have a miserable time arranging other

accommodations. The fulfillment of present desires only

creates a vacuum for future ones: I desire to finish the

p-set so that I can then desire to get a good job, and I

desire to catch my flight so I can then desire to spend my

entire break with my family.

For some reason, we still hope that the fulfill-

24 ◆ Fall 2019

ment of present desires will finally bring us to Paradise,

even though we can see that the fruition of

past desires has not tangibly affected us in the

present. But why? Paradise is a place where

our desires are eternally fulfilled, but if our

desires are so temporal that this is impossible,

what’s the point? We will always seek

better things, even if the best things are

slightly out of reach. For Dickinson’s

speaker, the present is “Amherst”,

a place described in relation to the

speaker’s hopes for the future. The speaker’s

questions about Paradise center on how

it differs from Amherst. The lines “Is it always

pleasant — there — / Won’t they scold us — when

we’re hungry — / Or tell God how cross we are —”

reveal that the opposites are true of the speaker’s present

experience: It is unpleasant, someone scolds the speaker

for being hungry, and authority figures are not receptive

of the speaker. Most telling, Dickinson includes, “Maybe

— ‘Eden’ a’n’t so lonesome / As New England used to

be!”, indicating that the speaker presently faces loneliness.

This painful present defines the speaker’s desires for

her future. The speaker longs for fulfillment in relational

community.

New England in the 1840’s seemed to promise

the relational Paradise Dickinson ached for through

communalism, notably attempted with the communities

of Brook Farm and Fruitlandsin Massachusettsduring

Dickinson’s lifetime. Communalism sought Paradise

through intentionally-structured community, but failed.

Throughout all of history, humans have striven for Paradise

on earth — through capitalism, communism, different

monarchies, and every other system imaginable.

Today, on campus, we similarly seem to believe in human-won

Paradise. But communalism couldn’t fill every

pain in New England. Nor have capitalism, communism,

monarchies, or other systems cured the world of its maladies.

We’ve seemingly exhausted all the possible routes

on our quest to return to Eden, and none of them take

us back home.

We cannot get back to Eden. We have been shut

out of the possibility of real utopia on earth. History has

proven that humans are inherently selfish and faulty,

perhaps to varying degrees, but universally. And even at

our best, our desires are unique to us as individuals and

largely circumstantial. With this in mind, we can never

realize what is perfect and good for us in the long-term,

let alone for other people. Instead, we need a common

thread to bind us together in unity, while entailing a setting

aside of ourselves; that thread needs to be a firm and

immutable truth.

When we think about wanting Paradise, we ask,

“How can we make the world better?” We acknowledge

its faults. I humbly suggest that Christianity addresses the

entire conundrum of Paradise: the faults of the world,

the implausibility of finding Paradise due to fractured

humanity, and our inability to pinpoint what exactly is

good for us. But it also offers a way to reach Paradise,

though not through human endeavors toward the past

or future. Christianity offers the consistency of a loving

God who lives in infinity, steadfast despite the changing

tides of time. Christianity is not mere wish fulfillment,

but rather a better solution than communalism, communism,

capitalism, or any other system imaginable. It

provides better, truer, steadfast desires that will lead us to

Eden. For Dickinson’s speaker, this is the answer to her

questions of Paradise. It seems that the speaker dies in

the final stanza of the poem, marked by change in verb

tense — “shan’t” and “won’t” become “ain’t”, and now

New England is in the past. The ambiguity of “Maybe

—” suggests that perhaps she finds herself in restored

relationship with others and in satisfying community.

A good God desires good things for His creation. And

unlike people, who are fickle and wayward and woefully

imperfect, God is all-seeing, constant, and above all else,

good.

Is Paradise for ourselves and for our campus

just around the corner, after the next protest, after the

next wellness discussion? Perhaps. But perhaps our desires

for justice, home, and contentedness, though extraordinarily

noble pursuits, are too temporal to sustain

us and too blurry around the edges to formulate in a way

that is good for everyone. It often feels we will never succeed

in our aspirations. Every day we hunger for Paradise,

but the answer is in plain view. Thinking externally

of ourselves, outside of the finite timeline that binds us

to specific moments, and thinking outside of our own desires,

we reach for it. So we stretch our hands towards

Paradise.

logos ◆ 25

Staff

Editor-in-Chief

Bradley Yam

Saybrook ‘21

Executive

Director

Vienna Scott

Franklin ‘21

Managing

Editor

Raquel Sequeira

Timothy Dwight ‘21

Editor-in-Chief

Emerita

Kayla Bartsch

Hopper ‘20

Staff Writer

Jadan Anderson

Morse ‘22

Staff Writer

Ben Colon- Emeric


Staff Writer

Bella Gamboa

Jonathan Edwards ‘22

Staff Writer

Sharmaine Koh

Silliman ‘22

Staff Writer

Jason Lee


Staff Writer

Sharla Moody

Berkeley ‘22

Staff Writer

Serena Puang

Davenport ‘22

Staff Writer

Isa Zou


26 ◆ Fall 2019

Our Mission

λ ο γ ο ς is Greek for “word.” The disciple John used “Logos” as an

epithet for Jesus, invoking language as an image of incarnation —

the Word made flesh. In Christianity, Logos became personal. Because

Christ clothed himself in flesh, he became a life giving light to

us, revealing the truth of all things. The Yale Logos takes on this name

because our Mission is also personal and incarnational. We believe

that by loving Christ and our fellow learners passionately with our

whole heart, soul and minds, we align ourselves with Yale’s pursuit of

truth and light.

ONLINE

www.yalelogos.com

www.facebook.com/YaleLogos

Instagram @yalelogos

SUMBISSIONS AND INQUIRIES

yale.logos@gmail.com

ACKOWLEDGEMENTS

The Logos team gratefully acknowledges the support of Amber Buhagiar,

Carlos Eire, Justin Hawkins, Patrick Hough, Wyatt Reynolds, Kierstin

Rischert-Garcia, Peter Wicks, the Elm Institute, and the coaches and

members of the Augustine Collective.

Logos receives funding from Yale University Undergraduate Organizations

Funding Committee and Christian Union Lux.

logos ◆ 27

λ ο γ ο ς

Desire

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?