Sacred Desire : Growing in Compassionate Living

SACRED DESIRE is a collaboration between two psychiatrists and grows from their scientific monographs. Underlying focus is on healthiest human living from womb to old age. The authors' thesis is that all goes well when the wee womb dweller is begotten by loving parents and immersed in love from birth. Things go badly to the extent that the pre-born is not wanted or loved. No young human can possibly survive to adulthood if someone, somewhere in her nearest environment does not love her and give her an opportunity to love them back. Parents may mistreat us. But if we are alive, there had to be a grandmother or a neighbor or a caregiver nearby who was kind to us, accepted us as we were. Love keeps us in our First Nature. Abuse drives us into a wounded, hostile Second Nature. Personal maturity and even the creation of a just, happy global order demand that we find ways to repair our wounded Second Nature and live as much of our lives as we can in caring, generous, empathetic First Nature. We are "hard-wired" for loving and being loved. The authors root our need for love in psychology, physiology and neurology. There is much talk of right brain, left brain, mirror neurons, oxytocin and their working together to point us humans toward transcendent love of a God who first loved us. There are charts showing interconnected stages of growth in both love and physiology. The book, SACRED DESIRE, includes dozens of case studies and examples: including a rabbi chaplain who bonded with a patient embarrassed to talk in her hospital gown by putting on a hospital gown himself. Most impressive to me was the lengthy treatment of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, his slowly achieved recognition of his evil Second Nature during 20 years in Spandau Prison and his ultimate return to the primal innocence of his First Nature. This is an ambitious book aimed at several audiences, far from easy reading. Five years from now it will, I fear, probably seem crude and medieval. That is because there are so many people now researching and writing about mind-body-love connections that new hypotheses spring up almost weekly. -OOO-