The Deacon

“One thing I ask of the LORD; / this I seek … / To gaze on the LORD’s beauty” (Ps 27:4). “Oh God, you are my God — / it is you I seek!” (Ps 63:2). “My soul rests in God alone” (Ps 62:2). God alone, and that is enough.

But is he? What drives me? After all, there is more that I need and desire: sustenance, purpose, meaning — let alone food, drink, shelter, relationships and beer. Shall we do a little philosophy?

The ancients observed — and many keen observers of humans have since recognized — that man is a creature of desire. I cannot not desire. And what I desire is, in the abstract sense, a “good” — that is, something I perceive as “fulfilling my desire.” When I am united with (obtain) that “good” I desire, I am fulfilled. That fulfillment, we call “happiness.” Moreover, there is a multiplicity of “goods” — perhaps a cacophony of competing goods, perhaps an admixture of genuine goods and of apparent but false goods, perhaps a cluster of noble and self-effacing or less-than-laudable goods, perhaps a symphony of well-ordered goods, abstract or concrete — that I perceive and desire and that drive my bus. Action flows from desire and choice of goods, whether I am conscious of this or not, whether I am mindful of this or not. I desire goods, I act, and if I obtain the “good” I desire, I am fulfilled, I am “happy” (cf. this column in the September/October 2021 issue of The Deacon, “Desire Itself Is Gift”).

Now I’m greatly simplifying the philosophy and psychology here, but this is how we work. Consider: Why did I do all the things I did today — truly, from deep within? Moreover, wise observers of human desire, choice and action have all agreed: There is an objectively true hierarchy of goods — that is, a well-ordered relationship of one good to another, such that one overarching good, one summum bonum supersedes all others, outlasts all others, gives meaning to all others and, most importantly, fulfills me in such a way that should I attain it, I cannot desire anything else. I am happy in the fullest sense possible. That happiness is what drives my bus. The philosophically derived short list of candidates for this “greatest good possible” is a very short list (wealth, fame, glory, power), and further reflection shows that these either attend to or serve a yet “higher” good: to contemplate — to see and so possess — “the one” uncreated greatest good.

Two problems. First, to contemplate the one greatest good is an undertaking simply not afforded to the vast majority of human beings; circumstances force us to attend to work (for necessary but lesser things), the stupidity of others (ineptitude, ignorance), the vicissitudes of nature (plague, famine, climate). Who has the luxury of pursuing the summum bonum? Second, even if at the best of times I could, I find I don’t. My own cupidity and lack of interior rectitude — in short, my vice — precludes the possibility. The Greeks acknowledged this: we will never be fulfilled — that is, happy — in life; time-bound creatures cannot attain the uncreated one.

How, then, can God be enough?

Simply because he first desires me. The one greatest good reveals himself as love. He desires me and unites me to himself. I cannot fully attain him, but he attains me by giving himself — infinitely, presently, unceasingly — to me, even now. “All the way to heaven is heaven,” St. Catherine of Siena graciously reminded me on a recent trip to Rome. That is enough. Prayer is the habit of lingering in his presence, of consuming and being consumed by him.

“Taste and see that the LORD is good” (Ps 34:9).

DEACON JOSEPH MICHALAK is the director of the Office for Synod Evangelization in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis.