"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

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