Perspective: The Deep Hunger

The following perspective is an excerpt from a sermon I'm currently writing.  The entire sermon, tentatively titled "The Bread of Life," will be posted on August 5, 2018.

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Comments are always welcomed.

If you find these thoughts helpful, please share.

The Deep Hunger

Blessed are you who are hungry now,

for you will be filled.

Luke 6:21a (NRSV)

Can you take me higher

To the place where blind men see?

Can you take me higher

To the place with golden streets?

From “Higher” by Creed

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says.  “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”¹

There is a hunger within us that has nothing to do with our stomachs, a hunger that cannot be satisfied with literal bread.  This hunger is, I think, a longing for transcendence.  In other words, we want more than what this life has to offer.  We long for what Jesus calls “eternal life” or  “abundant life,” a life that is, in the words of one writer, characterized by “the experience of deep joy, boundless love, and indestructible peace.”²  This is the hunger of which Jesus speaks.

We feel this hunger deeply, so we try to fill our lives with things like materialism, romance, careers, hobbies, and entertainment.  Such things might make our lives seem full for a while, but they do not truly satisfy our deep hunger because they do not last.  The stuff we buy wears out and breaks; our relationships cool down; our careers take downturns; our hobbies become boring; and our favorite television shows are inevitably canceled.³  Such things give us only a fleeting sense of satisfaction, in the same way that literal bread leaves us feeling hungry again within only a few hours.  They do not stick to our ribs, spiritually speaking.  Perhaps this is why Jesus says, “Don’t work for the food that doesn’t last but for the food that endures for eternal life.”⁴

Great Christian thinkers have been contemplating this ineffable longing for thousands of years.

C.S. Lewis, in his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” speaks of “a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy.”  It is, he suggests, a desire for something outside of our earthly experience, a desire for something infinite and eternal.  Since the object of our desire is something we do not truly know or understand, we naturally try to fix our desire on things that are actually familiar to us, things that are, at most, merely symbolic of the true object of our desire.⁵  That said, it is totally understandable that we would attempt to satisfy our deep longing with things that give us no lasting satisfaction.  The good news, Lewis claims, is that the very fact that we experience this hunger means that this hunger can somehow be satisfied.⁶

In Bruce Marshall's novel The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith, the titular character gets into an argument with an author over clerical celibacy.  When the author suggests that “religion is only a substitute for sex,” the priest replies, “I still prefer to believe that sex is a substitute for religion and that the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God.”⁷  Perhaps, beneath all of our longings and all of our efforts to satisfy those longings is a longing for God.

The seventeenth century French theologian Blaise Pascal suggests in his work Pensées, that the motive behind every action of every person, be it constructive or destructive, is the desire for happiness.  He goes so far as to say that “the will never takes the least step but to this object.”  Despite our best efforts, the happiness we seek seems to remain hopelessly out of reach.  Pascal asserts that true happiness is something we cannot attain without faith, for “the infinite abyss,” which some have named the “God-shaped hole,” “can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”⁸

Perhaps St. Augustine expressed this thought the best over one thousand years earlier in his Confessions, in which he prays, “Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”⁹


Notes:

1. John 6:35 (CEB)
2. Shane Hipps.  Selling Water by the River: A Book about the Life Jesus Promised and the Religion That Gets in the Way.  2012, Jericho Books.  p. 7
3. Hipps, pp. 3-4
4. John 6:27 (CEB)
5. C.S. Lewis.  “The Weight of Glory.”
6. ibid
7. Bruce Marshall.  The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith.  1945, Houghton Mifflin Company.
8. Blaise Pascal.  Pensées.  Translation by W.F. Trotter.  1958, E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.  Section VII, #425
9. St. Augustine of Hippo.  Confessions.  Translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey.

The photograph of the sourdough bread was taken by Flickr user Steph and is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.  The photographer is in no way affiliated with this blog.