The Cultivation of Desire

The Slow Cooperation with Grace Towards Personal Sanctity

Wendell Berry once described trying to build a pool on a hillside of his farm. The project promised refreshment, beauty, even a kind of mastery over the land. But instead it left an ugly wound in the hillside. The hill couldn’t support the weight of the water, and the whole slope was torn apart for years—a scar where the land had been forced beyond itself. His regret was not only about the failed project but about what it revealed: that quick fixes and grand gestures often harm what requires patience, humility, and reverence.

Our souls are much the same. The well-run farm is a living picture of how desire ought to grow: slowly, season by season, with care. There are no shortcuts to fruitfulness. What Berry learned about his hillside pool, we are always tempted to learn in our own hearts: when we try to wrench them suddenly into shape, we leave scars. Conversion is not a single once-for-all project, but a lifelong cultivation. It is the work of God’s grace cooperating with time, habit, and patience.

The Slow Growth of Desire

Desire is not something we manufacture on our own. It is cultivated in us, always in relation to others—our families, our teachers, our peers, our saints. Mimetic theory, as René Girard observed, tells us that we do not generate desire from within; we receive it. Our role in cultivating desire, then, is to choose which models will shape us and to do so steadily, with endurance. The farm grows in seasons, not seconds. So too does the human heart.

Yet even our choice in models is influenced by mimetic desire. In my own work on composite models, where mimetic desire and memory converge, we can see how our history exerts a gravitational pull on our choices. Free will is present, but often requires us to struggle against the weight of these inherited patterns in order to exercise it. And the spirit of the age is always ready with a new challenge as well.

Conversion as Cultivation

There is a myth in our culture that change can happen in an instant, that a single decision, a therapy breakthrough, or a spiritual high will permanently reset our lives. But real conversion is slower and deeper. It is daily. It unfolds in prayer, in sacraments, in friendships, in habits. It is the slow reshaping of desire away from rivalries and false satisfactions and toward the imitation of Christ. The soil of the soul cannot be tilled once and for all; it must be cultivated every year.

Heraclitus once said, “A man never steps in the same river twice.” The same can be said of our desires. Each time we face a choice, we do so within a slightly different mimetic environment. Sometimes the composite model that shapes us makes the choice easier; other times, competing models make it harder. Either way, we never make the same mimetic choice twice. Cultivating desire means learning to work with what we have, directing ourselves toward healthier models even as those models shift over time. If we try to change too quickly, or for the wrong reasons—as Berry discovered with his hillside pool—we risk leaving wounds rather than fostering growth.

To choose other than we have desired in the past is to pull away from our own model that lives in our memory. At first, this is very difficult. In farming terms, we are trying to divert a stream or a road through areas with rocks and trees.

Habits of Sacrifice

Vice is best understood not as isolated actions but as habits, habits of blood-sacrifice. We scapegoat, we blame, we protect ourselves at others’ expense. These are the reflexes of a heart bent toward rivalry. René Girard made clear that these habits are not incidental; they are the way human communities have often held themselves together through scapegoating, until Christ exposed and overcame this mechanism. Virtue, by contrast, is the habit of self-sacrifice. It is the patient imitation of Christ, who gave himself without rivalry. These two paths, blood-sacrifice or self-sacrifice, are more than just moral options; they are the ways of cultivating desire. One feeds envy and violence, the other nurtures love.

Counter-Cultural Patience

Everything around us urges speed. We want instant results, measurable outcomes, and quick resolutions. But the life of grace insists on something different: a patience that resists the culture of immediacy. Just as a farmer cannot hurry the seasons, we cannot hurry conversion. Grace works with time, not against it. Our task is to remain faithful in the slow work. Gil Bailie has often noted how cultural forces push us toward rivalry and quick solutions, while the Gospel calls us instead into the slower, sacrificial work of love.

God the Farmer

Berry’s farm image becomes more than a metaphor—it points to God himself as the farmer of our souls. Christ tells us, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” James urges us, in James 5:7, to be patient like a farmer waiting for the harvest. In both, the picture is clear: God cultivates, patiently, lovingly, slowly. He does not demand instant perfection but faithful growth. As Mother Teresa famously said, “We are not called to be successful, but faithful.” And as Bishop Barron often emphasizes, grace does not destroy nature but perfects it—God cultivates what is already there, raising it up by his love.

The cultivation of desire, then, is not our project alone. It is God’s work in us, and our cooperation with him. Like a farmer tending fields, we till, we plant, we weed, but we also wait. The well-run farm is not the result of one grand gesture, but of years of patient care. So it is with the soul. With God’s grace, our desires are slowly cultivated until they bear fruit worthy of eternity.