Global Dialogues

The pervasive sense that the world is “spinning out of control” is not only a description of our times; it grows from what René Girard called mimetic desire, our habit of wanting things because the people we look up to want them. Imitation draws us toward the same goods, roles, and status, and collisions follow with one another and even with our heroes. Rivalry spreads by further imitation and hardens into factions. To stop the chaos, communities have often turned to what Girard names the scapegoat mechanism, blaming and punishing one person to recover a fragile peace. But as the biblical witness brings the innocence of victims into the light, and as a connected world multiplies imitation, the trick no longer works. Each side nominates its own scapegoat, unity never arrives, and we are left with rivalry without resolution and violence without renewal.

John S. Dunne, CSC, suggested another road: the road of the heart’s desire. He found it by meditating on what he called “four little sentences from Tolkien” in The Lord of the Rings:

“Things are meant”

“There are signs”

“The heart speaks”

“There is a way”

These are far from platitudes. They are waymarks that point through opposition toward the life divine. Dunne explained that meaning is “something I discover rather than something I invent.” Such recognition offers a way out of feelings of powerlessness. Even amid global crises, meaning can be found and agency reclaimed.

When life feels dark, the way is not escape but a conscious consent. For Dunne, this is through a conscious withdrawal that “waits on insight,” on the whole person already forming, and on God already at work. Consent is not resignation. It is becoming “conscious where [we were] unconscious and willing where [we were] unwilling,” so that the inhuman pressures lose their hold and we become “simply human.” In that stance we “wait on the unknown”; “the waiting is itself a beginning.” Then loss, sacrifice, the hiddenness of God, even death can belong to one’s life and times rather than unwelcome aliens. We listen. “My heart speaks clearly at last,” says Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. Dunne adds, “You have to wait on the heart to speak.” Waiting asks for one step at a time out of the heart.

In my sculpture, teaching, and scholarship I try to create waymarks of beauty that help communities take such steps. Beauty is not ornamental but reorienting, a shared focus that can gently reorder desire without turning us into rivals. As Dunne wrote of Dante’s “In His will is our peace,” this peace is “the criterion of the heart’s desire,” “the road that is the true road.” This kind of peace is not the absence of conflict but desire rightly and beautifully ordered.

This conviction underlies my current project, Waymarks Toward Reunion, for which I am seeking support to implement at both the University of Scranton and Georgetown. Through art, theology, and dialogue, the project gathers students, artists, and scholars across traditions to listen for the heart’s desire. The wager is simple: if we can be taught again to recognize beauty as a sign of the light in the darkness, then perhaps we can find “a way out of no way,” even in crisis.

Dunne once entered into dialogue with Girard about this. Girard affirmed that Jesus’s death reveals the innocence of all victims and the violence of human society, but when pressed on the resurrection, he admitted it was a “mystery of faith” beyond rational explanation. Dunne later reflected that Girard was right to unveil the single victim pattern of scapegoating, but this unveiling was not enough. The Christian mystery, he insisted, is not death alone but “passing through death to life.” If Girard unmasks rivalry, Dunne’s emphasis on resurrection shows desire transfigured, the truth of “the love that is stronger than death, stronger than violence.”

For Girard, the path out is not the triumph of one side but a change in whom we imitate. We turn from rivalrous examples to Christlike examples that do not depend on rivalry. For Dunne, the alternative is the road of the heart’s desire. For me, the task is to offer waymarks of beauty that awaken the heart: artworks, poems, classrooms, and conversations that help communities remember, hear, and see again the One Real Heart of all.

Even this essay is a small experiment in that direction, written in conversation with students, colleagues, the witnesses of story and scripture, and an artificial intelligence. That dialogue too is a waymark, a reminder that even our newest tools should be consecrated to the road of the heart’s desire.

The crises of our time will not be solved by rivalry. They may be transformed by desire that is beautifully ordered, desire discovered as universal belonging; as meant, as a sign, as the voice of the heart, as a way home to Beloved God.

Patrick Beldio is a visiting assistant professor in the Theology/Religious Studies Department at the University of Scranton and a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University.