When the world of desires does not find space in the inner life one is easily exposed to voluntarism, to the precise and punctual fulfillment of one's commitments, but only by virtue of duty, but incapable of enjoying one's life and therefore of being happy. It is the purely legal perspective of the ban; in addition to fear, this attitude can delude itself into communicating a serious and efficient vision of existence, where there is no room for the gratuitous, the pleasure of dedicating oneself to something simply because "it's beautiful". 

However, this way of life has a long tradition behind it; perhaps it might be interesting to show some approximate glimpses of it. Without wanting to judge history, the fact remains that fundamental realities of Christian life have actually been crossed by rigidity and rejection of life.

 

Even such an important theological place of preaching and Christian life, such as Jesus' death on the cross, has unfortunately been read with the categories of fear, revenge, anger, and a purely fiscal retributive justice. You can refer to the collection of homilies on this theme edited by Fr. Sesboüé:

«The anger of God could not be appeased and neutralized except through such a great victim as the Son of God, he who could not sin» (Luther).

«Sweet Jesus surrendered himself spontaneously with love, for our sake, allowing all the wrath, vengeance and punishment of God, deserved by us, to fall on him» (Taulero).

«Everything had to be divine in this sacrifice; a satisfaction worthy of God was needed, and a God was needed to accomplish it; a vengeance worthy of God, and that it was similarly God who carried it out" (Bousset).

«What power, my God, have you given to your priests by telling them: “Do this in memory of me”! Their word has become a sharper and sharper instrument than the knife that slit the throats of the victims of the ancient law" (Monsambrè).

«Look, however, how the victim is destroyed, consumed, annihilated. On Calvary she was wounded: here she is crushed... Everything has been compressed, crushed, reduced to this unobserved crumb" (from a 19th century devotional book).

«In the light of the cross, which is a scaffold for capital execution, the death penalty takes on all its supernatural, infinitely fruitful and beneficial meaning» (Bruckberger).

It is the theme of legality and satisfactory justice applied to theology and preaching, and where the focal point, the most important reality has become sin with the consequent punishments. If the sin is the fruit of hatred, it therefore requires a corresponding hatred to atone for it: the more serious the sin, the more cruel and violent the atonement must be. 

Every other feeling seems to have disappeared: «God's vengeance somehow fuels that of the Jews, to the point that it is difficult to see why one is holy and the other sacrilegious. God becomes the executioner of Jesus" (Sesboüé).

If the Gospel often warns the believer against the risk of hardness of heart and legalism based on pure retributive justice, typical of the Pharisee, it is not because he feels resentment towards a particular category of people, but because he embodies the risk always present in the life of the disciple, to stop at the externality of the norm and to exclude the heart from the relationship with God, believing oneself to be righteous. The law is important, Jesus did not abolish it, he actually fulfilled it; and yet without love, which the law is called to safeguard, man risks putting himself in the place of God. Feelings, however, are humble by their nature, they bring the person back into contact with the earth that constitutes him (humility comes from the Latin humus, earth) and make it humble when it welcomes them, allowing you to experience an embodied spirituality. 

As Radcliffe, former superior general of the Dominicans, notes, «killing passions would be like preventing the growth of our humanity, drying it up. It would make us preachers of death. Instead, we must be free to cultivate deeper desires, aimed at the infinite goodness of God"

But how is it possible to "desire more deeply"? From this question arises the need for a work of confrontation with oneself, a moment of knowledge, certainly, but also of education and purification, because desire becomes an obstacle when it is superficial, when it is confused with the need of the moment, as we will see. 

Here the psychological discourse encounters some fundamental truths of spiritual life, such as asceticism and renunciation: they are not to be understood as enemies of desire, but as a path of recognition and maturation of what is truly worth, leaving aside what, although attractive, it takes away the zest from life, leaving the person at the mercy of the wind of whim: «It is not a question of giving up desire in itself - which would be inhuman - but of its violence. It's about dying to the violence of pleasure, to its omnipotence" (Brugues).