But our covetousness does not diminish that we were—and are—created to be desirous creatures, we were—and are—created to be, as St. Augustine famously said, “restless until [we] rest in you.” Here’s his quote in full:
“But still a mortal, a given portion of your creation, longs to extol you. In yourself you rouse us, giving us delight in glorifying you, because you have made us with yourself as our goal, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”1
Our desire is holy and angled toward heaven. We were made to desire.
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I am single, and I am a personal essayist. Therefore, you will occasionally get pieces on my singleness, this great in-between place of longing and contentment. This past January, I wrote a piece out of a place of emptiness and anger, tired of the drudgery of looking for my person and tired of praying this person would show up. In the comments, I said I was planning to write a more positive one in the future. Life happened, and that piece didn’t materialize.
Until now.
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If Genesis is the beginning of desire, then the Song of Songs is the end—the telos—of desire. Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible writes, “The Song of Songs redeems a love story gone awry.”2
The Song, with its explicit descriptions of intimacy and desire, is the resolution to humanity’s covetousness; it is pure desire within the most healthy of contexts; it is a picture of humanity back in the garden before taking a bite out of the apple. It is a right, beautiful, holy, rapturous relationship of desire.
Eugene Peterson preached that the Song—in which both the woman and the man are given space to be desirous—was assigned by some unknown rabbi to be read after eating the Passover meal. He writes,
“No lyrics, ancient or modern, communicate the intimacies and the exuberances of being whole and good in relation to another person—that is, of being saved—more convincingly than the Song.”3
The meal that represented salvation for the people of Israel was seen, according to this reading, as directly connected to the desire found in Song of Songs.
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I find desire as a single person to be precarious. I want to tamp it out because it feels like the culprit of all this angst, all this anger, all this restlessness. If I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t have to be up at night staring at the ceiling, wondering where she is. I wouldn’t have to feel devastated during break-ups. I wouldn’t have to feel this longing in my gut. None of that.
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In the New Testament, the church is emphatically said to be bride of Christ, with Christ as the bridegroom. Over and over and over again. If it’s alright, I’d like to quote my personal favorite, found in Revelation 21:9-12 (the Message):
“One of the Seven Angels who had carried the bowls filled with the seven final disasters spoke to me: ‘Come here. I’ll show you the Bride, the Wife of the Lamb.’ He took me away in the Spirit to an enormous, high mountain and showed me Holy Jerusalem descending out of Heaven from God, resplendent in the bright glory of God.”
Marriage then, is the closest relationship we have on earth to the relationship we will have with Christ in heaven. It is not a perfect picture—we still see in a mirror dimly—but it is a beautiful echo of heavenly union. It continues what Song of Songs began: an earthly example of heavenly satisfaction.
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writes in Faithful: A Theology of Sex, “Good sex points both spouses toward God.”4 The Bible—as I’ve outlined above—agrees with this. Good sex, and a good marriage, point people to God.I believe good desire—good singleness—points people to God as well. This longing I have in my gut—the longing you have in your gut—is holy evidence of a restlessness and longing and desire for God. It is an example of longing for Christ’s return.
Holy singleness, therefore, is the embodiment of the Augustinian quote:
“But still a mortal, a given portion of your creation, longs to extol you. In yourself you rouse us, giving us delight in glorifying you, because you have made us with yourself as our goal, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”5
My single heart is restless until it finds rest in marriage. My God-designed heart is restless until it ultimately rests with Christ in heaven. I am a living example of longing for others.
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So, dear single readers, may our restlessness for a spouse be only a foretaste of our restlessness for Christ. And may this restlessness be an example for the church around us.
St. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Sarah Ruden. New York, The Modern Library, 2017. 3.
Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1978. 144.
Peterson, Eugene. As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God. New York, Waterbrook, 2017. 174.
Felker Jones, Beth. Faithful: A Theology of Sex. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2015. 42.
Confessions, 3.
love this. i honestly feel like one of the biggest struggles about singleness isn't even the singleness itself, but all the weird, internalized, not really biblical ideas about it that i've absorbed, like the feeling that my desire for marriage (and that fact that it's unmet) is kind of pathetic, and marriage isn't really something i should want (despite the fact that everyone sings it praises) because singleness is a gift and i'm supposed to be content, and if i do want marriage at all then i should want it less because i don't want to idolize it, so then i feel guilty and pathetic again, and we start over from the beginning. all of these ideas have often made me feel absolutely stuck in a circular loop of painful feelings. it's a paradigm shift to instead be reminded that my desire is holy and sacred. it just feels completely different. will be mulling over this piece for a while, i think.
“Embodying holy longing.” It’s all so good Drew. Single or not, we’re all in a groaning state. Aching with a desire that this earth cannot fill.