Book Review

by Rick Dietrich

The Wounding and Healing of Desire:
Weaving Heaven and Earth
by Wendy Farley,
Westminster John Knox Press, 2005.

The book that accompanies Tim and Liz’s CD is nothing new for Wendy Farley. The Wounding and Healing of Desire resounds themes from Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion and Eros for the Other. Sin is bondage, particularly to egocentrism. God is love and not power.

But here these themes are sounded in a different key — I’m tempted to say a minor key — and, as always with Farley, the argument is worth following. If God is love and desire, then our desire — the deep longing expressed in the old Appalachian tunes Tim and Liz sing and play — our desire is a sign of the image of God in us. As God desires to love and be loved, so do we.

But our desire is wounded by sin; it is perverted by egocentrism. That is the bondage into which we have fallen. So, how is this egocentrism to be healed? How are we to be released from our bonds? Not by fiat. It is not Almighty God that comes to our rescue, but the Divine Eros that sets us free. There is indeed little evidence — even in the Hebrew Scriptures — that God is all-powerful, if God is powerful it all. Rather, we discover in Scripture — especially in the passion narratives — and we find in our own experience, God is not mighty and dreadful but vulnerable and loving. It is also true, though, that God’s love may be ferocious as well as tender, ferocious and tender at the same time.

How do we come to know this — to know God, to know God’s love, to become vulnerable to God’s desire for us and find healing? This is the practical end of the book, which begins in desire, turns to theological explanation, and then seeks to offer “a way.” That way is contemplation, and here I need to offer a disclaimer. This is not a way I understand in head or heart or practice, not having, that I can discover, a contemplative bone, or vein, or pocket of air in my body or spirit. So, I would have left it to the songs and to their power to draw us into longing. Indeed, if there is any disappointment with the book for me, it is that the songs play relatively little part as the argument goes forward.

But Farley writes knowledgeably and movingly about contemplation. It is an area in which she has read widely. And she knows not only the literature but the fruit of contemplation. About this, though, she is surprisingly modest: “The fruit of contemplation is this and perhaps only this — the deepening potential awareness of [God’s tender] love,” from which we come to “know ourselves as lovers of Christ.” And the desire wounded begins to heal.

  

Posted: 11-Jun-2006 2:30 PM