32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time November 7, 2026
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
“My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.” Is it though? Is it really? I mean, theologically speaking, yes. Every soul always longs for God on the most basic level of existence; that’s how we’re made. Everyone who clicks a link they shouldn’t, drinks themselves into oblivion, chases money at all costs, obsesses over politics, or doomscrolls until their brain melts is really looking for God.
But that’s not what I mean. Do you really long for God? If you want to know how to answer that question, then just look at how the psalm describes that longing. “Thus have I gazed toward you in the sanctuary.” How much time do you spend gazing at the Lord? “My lips shall glorify you… lifting up my hands, I will call upon your name.” How often do you glorify the Lord of your own free will? I don’t mean passively and half-heartedly responding at Mass or mumbling along with group prayer. How often do you choose to glorify God with your lips or lift up your hands in prayer? “I will remember you upon my couch, and through the night-watches I will meditate on you.” How often is God what you think about on your couch? How often do you intentionally turn your mind towards God in the middle of the night?
To yearn is human. We are filled with desire. We get depressed or bored when desires go unfulfilled. We get angry when our desires get thwarted. We become cold and dangerous when our desires aren’t acknowledged. And getting what we want is sometimes even worse: addiction, violence, pride, lethargy… When desire is such a dangerous force, it makes you wonder why God gave them to us and why scripture would use the language of desire so boldly.
But that is why we need wisdom. What sets us apart from animals is not the fact that we have desires, but that we have the capacity to govern those desires. To govern them is neither to indulge them nor to repress them. It is to understand them, guide them, and to provide for them only in the ways that are genuinely good. Ultimately, all human desire is connected to that fundamental desire for God rooted in our soul.
But try telling an addict to set down the needle and replace it with God. What do you think will happen? They’ll probably ignore you or perhaps they’ll just go through withdrawals. Better yet, the next time you’re hungry, try simply replacing lunch with God. Try replacing every meal with God. What would happen? You’d die of starvation.
To say “every desire is rooted in our desire for God” does not mean you can then bypass every desire by going straight to God. It means that those desires are meant to mediate our desire for God. What’s that mean? It means God created us body and soul on purpose. He designed us to experience him on both levels. Even before Original Sin, Adam & Eve had desires for things other than God. That’s why he gave them a garden. God would walk with them in the garden, but Adam & Eve would also eat food and play games and take naps and sing songs. The only difference was that, before they messed up, they encountered God in and through those other things. They mediated God to them, they were a means, a way to experience God indirectly.
In fact, Adam & Eve couldn’t imagine doing those things without seeing God in them. It was natural for them to eat the right amount, sleep the right amount, play the right amount, to see God in and through those things. The devil’s first trick was to introduce this idea of satisfying those desires apart from God, to break the connection between a good meal and divine intimacy, to sever the thread between beauty and divine splendor, to distort the interplay between human power and divine authority.
Ever since Adan and Eve first ate a meal that did not mediate God’s goodness, we have struggled to fill our bellies and souls at the same time. The war between flesh and spirit started there and it won’t stop until we die. Every choice to fulfill or deny a desire is now a battle in that war. What wisdom does is zoom out from seeing only the individual battles to look clearly at the whole war… and to remember how it started and how it ends.
This is why the psalm speaks so eloquently of longing for God. It’s why our first reading speaks of wisdom like a beautiful woman who has to be loved and desired and sought after. Wisdom means learning to see things from God’s perspective, but wisdom is not just a perspective. It is not just this idea of the cosmic battle between good and evil. Wisdom is to see and to long for real source of truth and goodness and unity.
But desire – including the desire for God – is not something we can simply control. Desires can be shepherded. They can be guided and influenced, indulged or denied, acknowledged or repressed. How we respond to a desire shapes us and the desire. Indulge your desire for pleasure too much and both you and that desire change. The desire grows and you become an addict.
This is why Jesus appeals to what we want even while he tells us to deny ourselves and carry our crosses. Adam & Eve ate the fruit that started a battle between stomach and soul… but Jesus describes heaven like a wedding feast. It’s because Jesus is reminding us of that mediation, that original design where human beings satisfy their desire for God in and through satisfying other desires.
So the path to heaven is not blind submission to our distorted desires and it is also not a total rejection of all desires. It is the practice of wisdom which cultivates the right desires and prunes back the disordered desires. The person who wrote the psalm wasn’t just lucky have a really strong natural desire for sitting in the temple and staring at the tabernacle. He wisely cultivated that desire. In other words, he sat there bored out of his mind and made himself try to pay attention to God. He chose to think about God while lounging on his couch or when he woke up in the middle of the night. Eventually, his tiny desire for prayer turned into a big desire for prayer.
The flip side of that is that we also have to choose to deny desires which make paying attention to God harder. To stop eating when full, to fast regularly, to drink this time when it’s a genuine celebration of a good thing and not drink that other time when you know it’s a desire to escape from God. It’s the choice to turn off the news about things I cannot change so I can focus on the virtues in my life I can change.
The foolish virgins in the parable did want God. But apparently they also wanted something else badly enough that it kept them from getting the extra oil they needed. The wise virgins saw more and wanted more. That’s why they were wise. They didn’t sit around all day praying and ignore all other desires, but they consciously cultivated their desire for God above all else and then governed other desires based on that.
This world is a long, dark night of confused desires that ends in death – we’re about to hear the names of everyone whose died in the past year – but wisdom is the light to get us through it. Feed that light with the oil of grace and prayer, of consciously choosing to cultivate your desire for God. You have to strive to pray when you don’t feel like it, to choose God when you don’t feel like it. It’s the only way you’ll learn to see God in all your other desires… to receive him in saying yes when you should and serve him by saying no when you should.
“My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.” Your soul is thirsting for God. The question is, are you wise enough to notice?