Desire: How Avarice and Acquisition Distort Our Longing for the Sacred / Micheal O'Siadhail

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

"Having lost a sense of the sacred, the only thing we want is acquisitiveness—more of everything. How can we break this vicious cycle of avarice? It seems to me that the only way we can possibly reign this in on ourselves is some retrieval of the sense of the sacred, something beyond ourselves.

And I think that relearning humility—realizing that a parasitic pathogen can spread across the globe and wreak havoc as it did—brings us to the question again of the sacred.

Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire? That we as creatures might want with all of our heart, all of our mind, to contemplate. Should anything less deserve our desiring really? Clearly there's a hierarchy of desire, but what is our overarching desire? Can we gamble on reimagining the wonder of a capacious God of endless surprises?" (Micheal O'Siadhail, from the episode)

About Micheal O'Siadhail

Micheal O'Siadhail is an award-winning poet and author of many collections of poetry. His Collected Poems was published in 2013, One Crimson Thread in 2015 and The Five Quintets in 2018, which received Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year 2018 and an Eric Hoffer Award in 2020. His latest works are Testament (2022) and Desire (2023). He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Manitoba and Aberdeen. He lives in New York.

Show Notes

• Micheal O’Siadhail, Desire
• Recitation: Epigraph
• Using poetry as a means to record the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Using words to process emotion
• Human desire for more; greed
• The internet as a driving force for consumption
• Consumerism feeding climate change
• Breaking the cycle by retrieving the sacred
• “Bless” is not a word used easily in our culture
• Recitation: Pest 12
• Gratitude within anxiety
• Recitation: Pest 20
• Stewarding the earth
• Recitation: Habitat 13
• What is worthy of our desire?
• The “stabilitas” of being where you are
• Wanting acquisitiveness more than the sacred
• Truly being known versus being famous
• Recitation: Behind the Screen 17
• Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation
• Recitation: Behind the Screen 20
• The temptation towards certainty
• Recitation: Behind the Screen 1
• Trusting the God of surprises
• “Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire?”
• Recitation: Desire 24 & 25
• “On Earth as it is in Heaven” as a dream
• Reordering and re-educating our desire
• Unity and Denise Levertov’s concept of “One-ing”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Micheal O’Siadhail
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give