food for thought

from a very powerful book, The Holy Way by Paula Huston
"Desire can lead us to create. But disordered desire starts the chain of events that leads to evil when in its pain and ignorance it imagines the unreal and attaches itself to these images."
further into the chapter, in the author's words:
Under fearful conditions, we crave what we think will calm our self-doubts. Our natural desire to be loved, for example, becomes an obsessive craving that can only be assuaged by fantasy -- a fantasy that allows us to become more beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished than we really are. This, in turn, allows us to attract astonishing people like ourselves into love affairs -- affairs that, even if we never acted them out physically, are legendary for their passion and depth. Absorbed in fantasy, we cannot see who is really in front of us; and certainly, we cannot love.
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