Homo Adorans

You shall love

—with all your heart,

with all your soul,

with all your might—

but we have learned to think instead.

To dissect.

To label.

To manage mystery

instead of fall to our knees before it.

We have made temples

out of reason,

sacrificed wonder

on the

altars of certainty,

and called it progress.

But the heart—

the Hebrew lev—

still trembles beneath the systems.

It has not forgotten Eden,

nor the God who walks in the cool of the day.

We are not brains on sticks.

We are not clean slates.

We are liturgical creatures,

worshippers by design—

homo adorans—

formed by what we love,

and disfigured by what we settle for.

Desire is not weakness.

It is the imago

pulsing through the dust,

the echo of Spirit

hovering over chaos,

the whisper that

called Abraham out,

and the fire that

led Israel by night.

But now the cloud is hidden

behind a screen.

The fire is replaced

by flickers of false light.

We no longer ask,

“What is good?”

but “What is next?”

We browse instead of behold.

We consume instead of commune.

And so the ache is dulled,

the pathos is pacified.

We fear longing,

so we pathologise it.

We distract ourselves from absence

with data and dopamine.

This is not the freedom we were promised.

This is Pharaoh in new clothes.

This is exile in high-definition.

Desire has become demand.

Pathos has become pathology.

And the sacred ache,

the holy wound—

it is traded for the quick fix,

the painless click,

the instant answer

that never satisfies.

Yet still—

beneath the algorithm,

beneath the Enlightenment’s crown of logic,

beneath the myth of the autonomous self—

a deeper voice calls.

Deep calls to deep.

Not to suppress desire,

but to re-form it.

Not to banish the ache,

but to baptise it.

The Psalms still weep.

The prophets still burn.

The Song still sings

of a Lover who leaps over mountains,

searching for the beloved in the night.

Even now,

desire can be a ladder to heaven—

or a spiral into self.

It depends what we adore.

It depends whose voice we heed.

So let me not be numb.

Let me not be mastered by the market,

nor moulded by metrics,

nor made forgetful by noise.

Let my ache remain.

Let it deepen.

Let it purify.

Let it burn like incense—

not for possession,

but for presence.

Let the shattered heart become sanctuary.

Let eros and agape find one another again.

Let my longings teach me to kneel,

and in kneeling,

to rise.

O Lord,

unmask my desires.

Turn them from golden calves

to living covenant.

Disrupt my habits of consumption

and lead me into habits of communion.

Re-enchant my gaze.

Restore to me the wonder of your name.

Teach me again to hunger and thirst

for righteousness,

for beauty,

for you.

And let my longing

become liturgy,

my breath,

prayer,

my body,

witness,

my love,

true.

Amen

—

Rev’d Jon Swales

Part of a series called Desire.