Holiness and Desire: What makes us who we are?

by Jessica Martin

What if the problem with desire is not that we want what we can’t have, but that we don’t want it enough? What if it’s in the gap between wanting and having that desire does the work which keeps us longing, yearning, hoping, burning, hungering, thirsting, calling, praying? A world that promises satisfaction is one that sells us imitations of our desires, and tempts us to settle for them.This is the world in which we find ourselves, and Holiness and Desire is a wise and profound exploration of it, using the tools of Christian theology but also those of culture criticism, literary analysis and memoir. Here, the church’s internal debates about sexuality are only one symptom of a larger unease over our whole relationship with desire.

Genres: Theology, Spirituality

164 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 30, 2020

About the author

This page contains works by multiple authors with the same name

Reviews

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jessica Martin (daughter of the acclaimed sociologist David Martin and wife of novelist Francis Spufford) is a talented and perceptive writer. 'Holiness and Desire' is a short book that marries personal history, cultural criticism, and biblical and theological reflection. It is divided into three parts - Scripture, Desire, and Holiness. She includes an extensive commentary on how pornography has devastated our society and affected how we look at one another. Martin is more liberal than I am - and English - but it's the type of "Protestant mainline" book I can appreciate and chew on; she tries to be fairhanded in critiquing both the right and the left. The book also draws praise from the likes of Charles Taylor, Alan Jacobs, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Sarah Perry.

[Sam Eccleston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd book to review. I substantially agree with the thrust of her argument, and she delivers her ideas couched in sensitive and insightful discussion. The book is clearly a product of the distilled wisdom gleaned over decades of study, reflection, and experience. And yet it is precisely the subtlety and fair-mindedness of the work that lends it a kind of slippery character; there are many beautiful passages that incisively describe the issues but, oddly, they simply aren’t memorable. Subtlety, comprehensiveness, and fair-mindedness can, and in this case have, faded into vagueness; the undoubted wisdom of the author doesn’t land with much impact. The thrust of the argument seems to be that desire connects us to God and to other people, and that traditional limitations on desire and self-definition have been oppressive, but that nevertheless commitment is valuable and self-definition is ultimately illusory and somewhat futile. So what do we do? How do we define excess, harm, or disorder? These questions are not answered in any detail.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not what I expected. Not bad, but ended up not really answering any of the questions it purports to address. It leaves a lot (and by that I mean almost everything) to "maybe this, maybe that."

I think I would have liked it more if it didn't raise all the issues and questions and disagreements about sexuality and Christianity and gender and all sorts of things and then act like it was going to answer them. If it was just a book that was about problems in the modern psyche and the way we understand relationships, then I'd give it a higher rating. There's some good things that are said. But to raise issues the whole book and then say "Jesus calls us to faithfulness" at the end? That's utterly unsatisfying.

I'd recommend You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World about the pressures of a self-made, individualistic society, and Addiction and Grace: Exploring the Psychology of Addiction, the Power of Spirituality, and the Path to Freedom Through Contemplative Practices about desire, humility, and longing instead of this one.

[Gervase Vernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The reverend Martin can certainly write well. The closing chapter on the value of faithfulness is flowing and lyrical.
The first section about her view of the authority of scripture is frankly difficult for a non-theologian like myself to read, but can be skipped.
The next section the book (about desire) is a mixture of sociology and her personal story, written to illustrate how desire can be manipulated and shaped by society. Yet, as her epigraph from Traherne states, 'Our wants are our treasures'. Without desires we might as well not be alive; they are what get us out of bed in the morning.
The first section , then, is about our desires and how they can be warped. The second is about holiness.
She goes against the modern trend by seeing the Christian life, not as a pilgrimage, a becoming who God wants us to be, but a 'coming home', a becoming 'who God has already declared us to be'. Of course both themes can be found both in the Hebrew scriptures and the NT.
Who should read this book? I think it is partly designed for Anglicans busy on either side of the current schism about 'Living in life and faith' and showing them a broader horizon, in order to reconcile the two sides -m to some extent at least.