We often speak of “passion” as if it were always a positive thing, encouraging people to “follow their passions” and thus, presumably, find fulfillment therein. If ancient philosophers and early Christians were to hear us speak in this way, they would likely be baffled: for our spiritual forebears, the passions normally indicate areas where we find our own freedom interiorly challenged when we try to live a life of virtue. It is about the passions that Paul complains when he says “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rm 7:19).
James 3 directly references the passions, saying, “Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions that make war within your members? […] You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” To properly understand James’s later insistence on the efficacy of prayer (James 5) one must first grasp the point that James makes here: if our prayer is motivated by our passions rather than by love of God, then we “ask wrongly” and will not receive.
In Wisdom 2, the passions prompt those not living according to God’s commandments to want to put the just one to the test through mockery and persecution, as they will ultimately do for the Just One on the cross. But even those who wish to follow the Lord are not removed from the domain of the passions. In Mark 9, the disciples argue about which among themselves is the greatest. To this, Jesus offers a response to our disordered passions: “if anyone wishes to be first, he shall be last of all and the servant of all.” It is Jesus’ Passion that reveals what rightly ordered “passion” is, whereas our “passions” are almost always a flight from the “one thing necessary” that the Lord asks of us. Let us ask the Lord to destroy the idols that we have fashioned through our passions, and to help us to learn to discern the movements within us on the basis of the life that Jesus lives for our sake, learning to temper always our passions by declaring freely, out of love, “let Thy will, not mine, be done!”