Vocational Desire

Are there other ways to talk about desire and learning? It may seem strange to think of there being a connubial quality to being a professor of a subject, but I would suggest that there is. Profession is not a knowledge-free telos, not a presuppositionless learning or teaching; it is a commitment, a marriage of ourselves to a subject that we treat with anything other than dignity and respect at our own peril.

Nicholas Wolterstorff has spoken of "eirenic learning," that is learning that promotes peace, ala' shalom. What are the covenantal qualities of vocation, then? Can there be, for example, an erotics of vocation, that is a study of how our gender and our desires shape us through the passionate drama of distance, proximity, embrace, and consummation as they apply in our teaching, research, and evaluation? Our gendered, bodily identities play roles outside our marriage, including in the extended ways that we practice fatherhood and motherhood. Even those who are gifted with singleness—themselves signs of the kingdom to come, bring their nurturing selves into their vocations. This is certainly true of the work of teaching, This is not only the case with the legal and ethical parameters of in loco parentis, but also with the more general way in which we inhabit a parental meaning in our friendships with students, as well as in mentorships and in general teaching.

Can one also speak of a desire within the aesthetics of education?

Animal, plant, flower, tree, spice, water, oil, honey--all such symbols imply the physicality of our desires and lovemaking, yet these very metaphors employed by Song of Songs also suggest a quality beyond this--a psychological and moral and aesthetic flowering. Similarly, Christian desire is in both separation and in fulfillment, not in continual separation as the heretical medieval notion of romance implies. The Christian love story of Christ for his Church provides a narrative for our own love stories to tell themselves by. The allegorical readings of Canticles as a story of God and Israel, Christ and the Church, or God and the soul are not entirely misplaced. They imply something important about the way we romance God via our studies. I will speak more on this below; for the moment, let me draw attention to George Herbert's lovely sonnet on this exchange of divine desire and worth:

Immortal Heat, O let thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it: Let those fires,
Which shall consume the world, first make it tame;
And kindle in our hearts such true desires,

As may consume our lusts, and make thee way.
Then shall our hearts pant thee; then shall our brain
All her invention on thine Altar lay,
And there in hymns send back thy fire again:

Our eyes shall see thee, which before saw dust;
Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blind:
Thou shalt recover all thy goods in kind,
Who wert disseized by usurping lust:

All knees shall bow to thee; all wits shall rise,
And praise him who did make and mend our eyes.

Our desires, wherever they may be located are not controlled per se by suppressing them--though there is a time and place for this, as well--but more often they are subsumed in the greater fire. "Usurping lust" is consumed in the great passion of the Trinity. While there is no marriage in heaven, our loves there are absorbed into the heavenly resurrection, and this end of our nuptial, bodily selves is worth remembering in an academic world that is finally so very subject to the temptation of disembodiment. Our journey into the love of a field of knowledge, with its parallels to marriage, also includes love's comic aspects.

Love’s comedy always renders us vulnerable and, thus, keeps us humble.