Why Must Read The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community?

Six years ago now, my life fell apart in the midst of a very public scandal concerning the company Ashley Madison. While much of the rest of the nation was captured by the drama, my world was turning to ashes. My husband had been a pastor. With his sin, I would come to lose my marriage, my friends and church community, and my four children (three years later) would lose their father to suicide. I felt all alone in the world. I sunk into a well of despair. I had my God who never left me and under whose wings I found warmth and comfort. But I longed to feel seen, soothed, safe, and secure. I wanted to be known. We are harmed in relationships and we are healed in relationships. At that point, I only knew the first part of that equation. I have a feeling that many people can identify with my story. The details might not be the same, but the feelings and longings and desires are not uncommon. In the Soul of Desire, Curt Thompson discusses every aspect of my story using words like shame and brokenness and even betrayal. He walks through the lives of real people like me with whom I can identify. He challenges people like you and like me to reframe our thinking and not see our lives as “problems to be fixed” but to imagine our “lives in terms of being curious about what the next new artifact of beauty is” that we want to create. Our Heavenly Father created beauty all around us, most significantly in the person of His Son in whose presence I long to dwell. I also long to dwell with His people. For me, my Bible Study community has helped me to piece the broken pieces of my life back together. But Curt describes an even more beautiful community, a Confessional Community, where members can be vulnerably honest and where they can feel seen, soothed, safe and secure. Those are the kind of relationships that I want and that Curt has challenged me to create. If you deeply desire to be known in relationships, and for “those relationships to energize” you to “create the beauty that we also long to become,” I would encourage you to read The Soul of Desire. Curt Thompson weaves together a fresh and solidly biblical look at the Scriptures, with interpersonal neurobiology, and an appreciation for the beauty of various artists and art forms especially the work of Makoto Fujimura. And He challenges us to not only see beauty, but to create beauty, and even to become beauty. I pray that your heart and soul will also be nourished and refreshed by The Soul of Desire.