Desire Changes Slowly...a post by Tom with David Brooks

All of us want change...just not the painful transition.  There is so much I would love to change about myself immediately, yet spiritual progress seems glacially slow at best.  If I know what needs to be changed now, then what is the hold up?  My desires.  A lessor desire can only be dethroned by a greater one.  That is the issue.  Cognitively I may want to change but affectively my desires are still held in check by lessor loves.  It seems that the way forward is to contemplatively steep my desires in love for God, which is more of a crock pot affair than a microwave one.  Check out the following quote from David Brooks "The Road to Character" and see if it encourages you."as people rise up and seek to meet God, their desires slowly change.  In prayer, people gradually reform their desires so that more and more they want the things they believe will delight God than the things they used to think would delight themselves.The ultimate conquest of self, in this view, is not won by self-discipline, or and awful battle within self. It is won by going out of self, by establishing a communion with God and by doing the things that feel natural and in order to return God's love.This is the process that produces an inner transformation.  One day you turn around and notice that everything inside has been realigned.  The old loves no longer thrill.  You love different things and are oriented in different directions.  You have become a different sort of person.  You didn't get this way simply by following this or that moral code, or adopting a drill sergeant's discipline or certain habits. You did it instead because you reordered your loves, and as Augustine says again and again, you become what you love."