Dear Hearts,
It’s been a long week, so this is coming a day later than I had hoped. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about hunger. The other afternoon I was walking back from an appointment, and I suddenly felt really hungry. And I realized I had barely eaten all day. I also knew, knowing my body well that if I didn’t get something quickly, I would begin to feel irritated and would eventually get a headache. So I stopped walking for a few minutes to try and figure out what I wanted to eat so I could walk in the right direction. Did I feel like Mexican, Thai, or Indian food? Did I want falafel? All were choices near me. I didn’t hesitate for one second before considering my choices because I knew so much was readily available to me, and I had the means to pay for anything I chose.
It was only over the weekend when I was reflecting again about this series and about what we’re bound to encounter while dwelling in the wilderness that I started thinking more earnestly about hunger, but from a different perspective. I realized that I use hungry as an adjective regularly in my life. And I know that we all can identify with being hungry because it happens to every single one of us every single day. Being hungry notifies us that it is time to nourish our bodies, to eat so that we can continue to go about our days doing whatever we need to do. But in thinking about this I started wondering about the difference between hungry as a adjective and hunger as a noun. At least in the way that I use it.
I use the former as part of my vocabulary all the time, casually, usually flippantly, sometimes irately. But it is rare that I use hunger the noun. To use it as a noun seems to come alongside a more dire or intense circumstance than the usual running between meetings feeling hungry. When hunger is used as a noun I immediately think of “to suffer from hunger” or “to have a deep hunger”, both of which seem aligned to some sort of crisis of body or spirit. So when I was considering dwelling in the wilderness I was thinking more of hunger the noun more so than the adjective.
When I get hungry during the day it is a feeling that triggers a need I can easily meet. I know to look for food to eat. And because of my position in life, I can do that easily and have my hungry feelings satisfied. At least for a while. As long as I am alive I will always experience being hungry at regular intervals. And I think it’s fair to same that the reality for everyone reading or listening to this reflection is that when we’re hungry in the hours of our daily lives we can immediately solve that problem. We have the means of feeding our physical bodies and satisfying our appetites. So in one sense it hit me that being hungry is a physical reminder of our position in the world, of whether we are privileged or disadvantaged, and often too though we don’t like to dwell on it, it’s a reminder of the cost and the consequence of such privilege to others. I hold that, and yet also think there are different kinds of hungers.
And as I’ve been thinking about wilderness hunger and how different that can be from our regular daily physical hungers for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I recognize that by nature, a wilderness is a landscape skim with options that fill or satisfy us. In the wilderness hunger can feel more primal and desperate. And because not everything that looks nourishing will sustain you or will even keep you alive feeding your hunger in the wilderness really requires discernment. It requires knowing what it good for you and what is not good for you and acting on that knowledge.
Unless you managed to figure out what your real options were before hunger overtakes you, and where to look, you’re more likely to make desperate and rash choices without concern for the consequences. Experiencing hunger without knowing exactly how to feed it can make us irrational, impulsive, and even cruel, acting out of character to stop the ache that comes with hunger.
So the thing I realized is…the thing about hunger is that it is so informative. It has so much to tell us about ourselves. It can tell us about our positioning, about our ability to make choices, about our needs and desires, about our agency or lack of agency. Usually, we’re understandably too consumed by it to decipher and acknowledge what information our hunger might have for us. Still, I’ve been thinking about it throughout the days lately. Hunger not only reminds us of our positioning in the world but more immediately draws our attention back to our bodies and reminds us that not only are we embodied but also that our bodies communicate passionately with us, alerting us to when we’re tipping along a danger zone and must pay our hunger attention. I love learning about the origins of words, especially the words we use so casually. And passion is one of those words. The Latin root of passion is the verb ‘patior’ which means to suffer. So unless we attend to our body’s passionate needs, of which hunger is one, we will begin to experience a suffering that more deeply commands our attention.
I think the wilderness we’re dwelling in collectively now is likely teaching all of us something about our individual hungers, especially the things our bodies are aching for that may be more symbolic of the things we are soul-hungry for. Like S O U L hungry. And I think our bodies hold our soul hungers just as physically, but we’re not used to thinking about hunger in that way. Still if we were gentle enough with ourselves to attend to our pains and our pain points more, I suspect we would find that we can feel our aches that point to the fact that we’re tired, or dissatisfied, fearful, or anxious, lonely…and those are hungers that also alert us to our needs and our desires. So it’s led me to summon up the courage to think more reflectively about what specifically I might be hungry for in this wilderness space. And I think it does take a lot of courage to pay attention to our hunger and to try to figure out what the need is behind our hunger. I think so often we have hungers that we just don’t know how to satisfy because we haven’t figured out what is most nourishing for us.
I think every day we all wake up soul-hungry for something. S O U L hungry. Hungry for more Love. More justice. More certainty. More courage. Our hungers take so many forms, and they often point to deeper desires beneath the surface. Desires of which any one of us could relate. Our hungers, even in their complexity, are important and beautiful, because they point us towards wholeness. Towards what might make us whole.
And yet every day in the midst of these hungers, we make choices about how to live. What informs those choices?
There are so many ways that I think our consumer-obsessed capitalist societies have given us a list of things that we have been told are supposed to feed our cravings for love, for companionship. for wholeness or community, for joy or happiness…but hardly any of those things are really about healing or wholeness or care-giving or sharing or making space for others, or compassion. I think our hungers are more connected than we realize and that we have a better chance of satisfying our soul hungers S O U L when we think more about how we’re tied to others. In any case, I don’t have the answers. I’m just thinking aloud with you in this season. And I guess, my question, or the question I’m holding myself and extending to all of you that might be reading this or listening to this is - what are you hungry for? What are you truly and deeply hungry for? And how are you trying to nourish that hunger? Is it working?
With such gratitude to you for being a fellow sojourner.
From my heart to yours,
Enuma
This is such a beautiful piece of writing which, ironically, I was listening to you read as I was eating my breakfast!
Your thinking made me remember Jesus’ answer to the devil when He was so hungry, physically hungry, in the wilderness. You alluded to needing to be prepared for our times of inevitable hunger, otherwise we will inevitably make unhelpful or bad choices. Jesus wasn’t spared the human need for food, nor the gnawing pain that can cause in our gut. But He was prepared spiritually for satan’s onslaught, satan’s tempting suggestions for instant gratification. Jesus knew that our hunger is deeper than physical discomfort, and that only the word of God can deeply satisfy, and for us only the Word of God will truly meet our hunger.
So I suppose I would add another question to those you ask at the end of your writing: Where are we looking to satisfy our hunger? If we look in the wrong places, we won’t find what our souls need and our deepest hunger will not be fed. Jesus was prepared for the wilderness, and His soul was fed. And He is our Bread to nourish our souls.
These are such meditative pieces. I took time today to read closely. In this wilderness, I am lingering over the words SOUL hunger, wholeness, and discernment...