Hundreds packed an Ottawa church Sept. 20 to hear Christopher West speak on St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body reveals how desire is part of God’s design to launch us to our destiny.
“If we learn to engage our desires in God’s plan for us, our desires will lead us to our destiny,” the popular American speaker and author said.
He spoke of how beauty wounds us. “It hurts to let beauty in. It makes our heart ache,” he said. The pain comes because the encounter with beauty is “fading and fleeting.”
“You want these encounters never to end,” West said. But allowing that ache and sadness for small “b” beauty, is really an ache for capital “B” Beauty, which is “infinite and never fades.”
West challenged those present to have the courage to follow their deepest desire to where it leads them. “This desire, this yearning, God put in us to lead us to Him,” he said.
This desire for God is called eros, but because of original sin our erotic desire, properly for God, has become twisted, he said. The post-sexual revolution world has further distorted the meaning of “eros.”
“Eros, the desire that God gave us that has the power to launch us to the starts is like the fuel of a rocket,” he said. “It’s so powerful that if the engine is misdirected, it has great power for destruction.”
