ROME — Pope Francis urged Christians Thursday to rekindle their desire for God, insisting that this desire was the secret of the Magi who found Christ in Bethlehem.
The Magi’s “spirit of healthy restlessness” that led them to set out on their journey was “born of desire,” the pope said in his homily for the Feast of the Epiphany, when Christians commemorate the arrival of the three kings to worship Jesus in the stable where he was born.
“That was their secret: the capacity to desire,” Francis continued. “To desire means to fuel the fire that burns within us; it drives us to look beyond what is immediate and visible” and to embrace life “as a mystery that surpasses us.”
When this desire dries up or goes cold, the pontiff suggested, religious faith also wanes.
“The crisis of faith in our lives and in our societies also has to do with the eclipse of desire for God,” he proposed. “It is related to a kind of slumbering of the spirit, to the habit of being content to live from day to day, without ever asking what God really wants from us.”
“We peer over earthly maps, but forget to look up to heaven,” Francis continued. “We are sated with plenty of things, but fail to hunger for what we are missing. We are fixated on our own needs, on what we will eat and wear, even as we let the longing for greater things evaporate.”
“And we find ourselves living in communities that crave everything, have everything, yet all too often feel nothing but emptiness in their hearts,” he said. “For the lack of desire leads only to sadness and indifference.”
But desire also needs to be elevated to seek the things that are above, Francis proposed, or it will never satisfy the longings of the human heart.
“We are what we desire,” he asserted. “For it is our desires that enlarge our gaze and drive our lives forward, beyond the barriers of habit, beyond banal consumerism, beyond a drab and dreary faith, beyond the fear of becoming involved and serving others and the common good.”
“Brothers and sisters, as it was for the Magi, so it is for us,” he said. “The journey of life and faith demands a deep desire and inner zeal.”
“Today is the day we should return to nurturing our desire. How do we do this? Let us go to the Magi and learn from their ‘school of desire.’”
“Like the Magi, let us lift up our eyes, listen to the desire lodged in our hearts, and follow the star that God makes shine above us,” he said, concluding, “As restless seekers, let us remain open to God’s surprises. Let us dream, let us seek and let us adore.”