When Your Will and Your Desires No Longer Agree

Have you ever stood in front of the refrigerator at eleven o’clock at night, hand on the door handle, having a full-blown argument with yourself? You want the leftover cake. You also want to be the kind of person who doesn’t eat cake at eleven o’clock at night. Two desires, both real, both yours, pulling in opposite directions.

It sounds like a small thing. But that little tug-of-war at the refrigerator door is a miniature parable of the entire spiritual life.

There is a strange and painful paradox that catches many Christians off guard somewhere along the road of faith.

When we first begin to walk with God in earnest, we often expect that growing closer to Him will make life feel more integrated, more peaceful, more whole. And in one sense, it does.

But in another sense, something troubling happens: we start to feel more divided, not less. We begin to want things we never wanted before, and we still want things we wish we didn’t want. The interior life, far from becoming quieter, sometimes becomes noisier, more contested, more of a battlefield.

What is going on?

 

The "Peace" of the Unconverted Heart

Before conversion, before the serious pursuit of holiness, there is a certain grim harmony in the soul.

The will and the passions largely agree.

If the flesh craves something, the will consents. If pride wants to be flattered, the will arranges for flattery, it seeks what it desires through people-pleasing. If anger wants to lash out, the will lets it.

There is no civil war because there is no rival government.

The self rules, and the appetites are its willing subjects.

This is what Saint Paul is describing when he writes about life “according to the flesh. "For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit" (Romans 8:5,).

Notice the language of “setting the mind.”

The mind, the will, the affections are all facing the same direction. There is a unity of orientation, even if that orientation is disordered.

This is why people sometimes look back on their pre-Christian life and remember it as, in some ways, simpler.

It wasn’t better. It wasn’t happier, not really.

But it was less internally contested. When you and your desires are on the same team, life feels straightforward, even if you are marching toward a cliff.

 

The Divided Heart of the Growing Soul

Then grace arrives. God begins His slow work in the soul. We start to pray. We receive God's gifts, His Sacraments. We read our Scriptures, not just for information, but seeking to grow.

The will, illuminated by the Spirit, starts to see differently. It starts to want differently.

Suddenly you desire prayer. You desire purity. You desire to forgive the person who hurt you. You desire to be generous. You desire the good, the true, and the beautiful in ways you never did before.

But here is where things get complicated.

The passions, the appetites, the deeply grooved habits of the body and the imagination, don’t necessarily convert at the same pace as the will.

They lag behind. They have their own memory, their own inertia, their own stubborn loyalties. Sometimes, even their own addictions.

So the newly awakened will finds itself yoked to a passionate nature, full of appetites, that has not yet to be fully converted, and the result is not peace but struggle.

But if this is you, and it probably is (because this is a fairly universal experience) you can take heart in knowing that some of the greatest saints, the most influential figures in the New Testament, experienced the same thing.

Take Paul, for example, who wrote: "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do" (Romans 7:19). And a few verses later: "For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members" (Romans 7:22-23).

Paul is not describing a pagan. He is not describing his former life in Judaism.

He is describing himself, an apostle, a saint.

And what he is describing is precisely the disjunction between a will that delights in God and a lower nature that resists. The war he describes is not the sign of a failing Christian. It is the sign of a serious one.

 

The Confusion This Creates

Many souls, encountering this interior division for the first time, conclude that they must be doing something wrong. “If I were really growing in holiness,” they think, “I wouldn’t still struggle with these desires. I wouldn’t still feel the pull of old habits. I wouldn’t still get angry, or envious, or lazy, or lustful. The fact that I do means I haven’t really changed.”

This is one of the great lies of the spiritual life, and it needs to be exposed.

The presence of struggle is not evidence of the absence of grace.

In fact, it is often the opposite.

Before grace, there was no struggle because there was no resistance to sin. The struggle itself is a sign that something new has been planted, something that pushes back against the old order. As Saint Augustine observed in reflecting on his own conversion, “My two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other spiritual, were in conflict with one another, and their discord robbed my soul of all concentration” (Confessions, Book VIII, ch. 5).

The very fact that Augustine could name two wills, and grieve their conflict, meant that grace had already begun its revolution in him.

It can feel downright schizophrenic. I get it, because I've been there. And some days I'm still there. It can be incredibly frustrating to recognize that despite wanting holiness, purity, and loving God more than ever before, in a single moment, you end up doing the think stoked by your passions and desires that you hate the absolute most about yourself. You might even realize it as it's happening, and as you're acting out, ask yourself, "Why in the world am I doing this? I don't want to do this...but I'm still doing it!"

This is why.

St. Thomas Aquinas explains that this internal friction exists because of how God in His wisdom applies grace to our nature. According to Aquinas, the soul possesses higher faculties—the intellect and the will—which are designed to lead, and lower faculties—the sensitive appetites or passions—which are designed to follow.

When God begins His work of conversion, He applies grace directly to the higher, rational faculties first, illuminating the intellect to know the true Good and elevating the will to desire Him.

While our highest selves are thus converted instantly and decisively by grace, the passions and appetites are not instantly transformed in their nature. They are rooted in our sensitive and bodily life and cannot "see" the spiritual truth that now governs our will.

 Instead, they must be slowly re-educated, disciplined, and gradually re-oriented to follow the new, God-directed leadership of the will. Until that long and patient work is complete, the passions continue to react according to their old, natural, and often distorted habits, creating the very "civil war" and "noisiness" of the growing soul.

This initial focus on the higher faculties ensures that our conversion is a truly human and reasonable act of free choice, while the subsequent, slower conversion of the passions allows for the deep formation of genuine virtue and humility through spiritual battle.

We are not our will alone. We are a complex being, designed by God, with desires, passions, and the like. The journey of holiness is one where what's disordered from within becomes re-ordered in grace. But it doesn't all happen at once, immediately. And as certain good aspects of ourselves (most of our passions of the flesh are actually good things, given to us by God for a reason, that we've bent-inward toward self and way from Love) seem to conflict with others, it can feel like you're losing your mind.

So, try to think of it this way. If you were slowly waking up in a room that had been dark for years, the light would hurt. Your eyes would resist. You would want to close them again. That pain is not a sign that the light is bad or that you are failing. It is a sign that light is doing what light does, and eyes accustomed to darkness are doing what such eyes do.

You could just close your eyes, and keep walking around in a lit room blindly. Or you could, through the will, force your eyes to remain open, maybe a little bit at a time, until they grow accustomed to the light that finally allows you to move around the room without stepping on the Legos.

 

Why Does God Allow the Delay?

Here is a question worth sitting with. If God can convert the will, why doesn’t He simply convert the passions at the same time? Why leave us in this awkward middle place, where our desires drag behind our decisions?

Several answers, none of them exhaustive:

First, because instant transformation would rob us of the deep work of becoming. God is not primarily interested in producing behavior; He is interested in forming persons. And persons are formed through choice, through struggle, through the slow patient reordering of loves. A soul that woke up one morning with perfectly ordered passions would be a soul that never learned to fight for its own holiness, never learned to depend on grace, never learned the humility that comes from knowing exactly what one is capable of without God.

Second, because the struggle teaches us the truth about who we are. It strips away the illusion of self-sufficiency. When you sincerely want to do the right thing and find yourself unable, you learn something crucial: you are not the master of yourself. You need a savior. Not a coach, not a self-help program, not a technique. A savior. "Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:24-25).

Third, because the passions, though slower to convert, are also being drawn along by the will’s conversion. It is not that God has ignored them. He is at work in them too, but through the will. Every time the will chooses against a disordered passion, that passion is weakened, just a little. Every time the will chooses toward the good, the appetites are reshaped, just a little. This is the long, patient work of what some spiritual masters call the purification of the senses.

It is not glamorous. It rarely feels like progress. But it is real.

 

Living in the Middle

So what do we do, practically, when we find ourselves in this contested space? When our wills say yes to God and our passions say something else entirely?

First, do not be scandalized by your own interior. The saints all lived here. Paul lived here. Augustine lived here. If you find that you desire God with your deepest self and yet still feel the pull of things beneath you, you are not a failure. You are a Christian.

Second, name the division honestly in prayer. Do not pretend to God that you feel what you do not feel. If part of you wants to forgive and part of you still nurses the grudge, say so. If part of you wants purity and part of you wants otherwise, say so. God is not offended by honesty. He is grieved by pretense. Tell Him: “Lord, I want to want what you want. Help me want it more.”

Third, act on the will, not the passions. This is crucial. In the moment of decision, ask not “What do I feel like doing?” but “What have I, in my truer self, chosen to do?” The passions will often shout. The will speaks more quietly. Learn to obey the quieter voice. Over time, the shouting subsides. This might take a dozen, or a hundred, failures for some of us to learn. But in the end, when we recognize the passions left us empty, unsatisfied, and we can name it, we give the will something to hold onto so that it can begin to override our appetites.

Fourth, be patient with the slowness of your own transformation. God is not in a hurry. He has planned for all eternity how He desires to make you into a saint, and He knows exactly how long the work will take. The soul that demands instant sanctity is often less humble than the soul that accepts the slow schooling of grace.

Fifth, receive the sacraments and rest in them. The Eucharist and confession are not rewards for those who have already conquered themselves. They are food and medicine for those still fighting. Come as you are, with your divided heart, and let grace do what only grace can do. If you are not Catholic, or a part of another tradition that has a sacramental life, or has formal confession, lean into the sources of grace that are available to you. Hear the Word. Pray fervently. Don't try to "fit prayer in" to your life, but start fitting your life in around your prayer life. Remember the truth of your identity revealed in your Baptism. Your name was spoken, and His name was spoken upon you. And if you cannot confess formally and sacramentally, at least find someone you can speak to honestly. What's left in the dark festers. What's brought into the light can begin to heal.

Sixth, remember the direction of the story. The war within is not the last word. "I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6). What God has started, He will finish. The disjunction you feel now is temporary. The integration you long for is coming. Not fully in this life, perhaps, but coming.

 

The Blessed Disturbance

St. John of the Cross once crafted a pretty powerful metaphor for the condition of the soul as it grows in holiness. It's like light shining through a window that suddenly shows you all the dust that's been in the air you've been breathing, but didn't realize was there until the light shone through. The closer one gets to the light, the more one sees the dust in the room.

This is not because the room got dustier. It is because the light got stronger.

Turning off the light, or pulling the shades over the window, might make you "less aware" of the dust in the air, but it won't remove it. Only when we remain in the light can we start to see how the grace we've received, and continue to receive, purifies us over time.

If you are troubled by the division in your own soul, take heart. That trouble is itself a mercy. It means the light has come. It means your will has begun to see what your passions have not yet learned to love. It means you are no longer at peace with what once made you comfortable.

Stand at the refrigerator door, if you must. Feel the pull of two desires. And know that this small, awkward moment is a participation in something not foreign to the faith, but integral to growth in our saintliness: the slow, patient, unstoppable work of a God who is teaching your whole self, will and passion, mind and heart, body and soul, to love what He loves.

The war is real. But so is the grace. And the grace is what wins the war.