Desire, Embodiment, and True Freedom

Desire has often been treated with suspicion. It gets called dangerous, selfish, even sinful. But if you read across different voices, Girard, the ascetics, Plato, and Lorde, another picture emerges. They do not always agree, but together they hint at something shared: desire is not meant to be killed. It is meant to be re-oriented, deepened, and lived through the body in ways that open us to communion, beauty, and freedom.

Girard: Desire and Conversion

René Girard writes about how our desires mirror those around us, pulling us into rivalry and conflict. Left unchecked, this cycle distorts what we want and how we see each other. But he also believed desire can be converted. It can turn away from false models toward something truer. For Girard, that was Christ, but the point stretches wider. Desire does not disappear. It becomes free when it no longer traps us in rivalry but opens us to life with others. That shift moves desire closer to communion.

Ascetics: Training, Not Erasing

Ascetics are often imagined as rejecting the body, but many were not trying to eliminate desire. They were trying to train it. The body was the place where love and discipline were practiced. Practices like fasting and celibacy were not about despising embodiment. They were about reshaping desire so that the body could serve communion and reflect beauty. The body was not an obstacle. It was the ground of devotion.

Plato: Expanding Beauty

In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima describes the ladder of love. At first it can sound like leaving the body behind in search of abstract forms. But another reading shows deepening, not rejection. Love for one beautiful body expands into recognition of beauty in all bodies, then into love of soul, and finally into vision of beauty itself. Desire for the physical does not vanish. It becomes part of a larger whole. Desire grows into beauty that is expansive and unifying.

Lorde: The Erotic as Sacred

Audre Lorde makes this insight immediate. For her, the erotic is not something to flee or transcend. It is already sacred when lived honestly. Through the erotic we experience power, connection, and freedom. Embodiment is not the barrier to these experiences. It is the way we touch them. This is not far from incarnation theology: God is not distant or abstract. God is with us, in flesh, in desire.

A Shared Thread

Across these voices, a thread emerges.

• Desire moves us beyond ourselves.
• When distorted by rivalry or commodification it becomes destructive.
• When embraced and embodied with care it opens us to communion, beauty, and freedom.

Closing

To live with desire is not to suppress it or to chase it blindly. It is to let it be embodied, relational, and real. The divine does not ask us to escape our bodies. The divine meets us in them. Desire, lived truthfully, is not an enemy. It is the gateway to communion, to beauty, and to true freedom.