My Hungry Heart

My path is not to satisfy my hunger…

but to realize hunger IS my path.

I’ve always been a hungry person.  I’ve hungered for a lot of things in the past and I continue to be hungry for many things.  In many ways my current personal sabbatical is a time and space in which I’ve had to look especially at the current hungers in my life.

Hungers of my spirit almost always manifest themselves in physical hunger, so I walk my journey as an overweight compulsive overeater.  (Usually…wishing I could get OVER it!)  “Hunger” is an apt word for my deeper yearnings.

This week, with the help of a reading by 20^th Century educator, theologian and mystic, Howard Thurman, who wrote eloquently on the deep hungers of being human, I formulated this above truth statement for myself.  It sent me on a rich journey of discovery.

I made a  “Hunger History” for myself, listing all the times and experiences from early childhood when I encountered some sort of deep hunger that for some and various reasons were a struggle to satisfy. It was helpful to identify them in general time segments: early childhood, later childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood.  I came up with about eleven hungers.  Hmm…like I said…a hungry person.

 As I suppose with most of us, when we feel yearnings, our automatic assumption and response is that we need to get those yearnings filled or satisfied or resolved or fixed in some way. Most of us like to be fixers.  Something is wrong when we can’t fix it.

Thurman said in his Meditations of the Heart, regarding the experience of pervasive of yearning,

“Slowly it may dawn upon the spirit that there is a special ministry of unfulfillment. It may be that the persistent hunger is an Angel of Light, carrying out a particular assignment in life…. At last, a man may say, ‘I know now that there is present in my life a quality that is only mine because the hunger is mine.’”  

 

I LIKE Angels of Light.  I LOVE the idea that my hunger is really an Angel of Light.  Nose to the computer, I spent the next hours exploring how each and every hunger I had struggled with in my life had led me down a path of growth and shaping of the person I am today. Hmm, perhaps the extra weight I’ve been acquiring and carrying around the last 10 years is actually my collection of diplomas (My PPhD=Doctor of Physical and Philosophical Hunger)!

So, the truth is, our hungers themselves are a path of the Spirit.  I don’t know where mine are currently leading me, but …as an overweight overeater…I know now that hunger is not something I’m likely to get over sometime soon. At least I can better understand them and be ready to embrace their benefits…and perhaps keep my philosophical hungers from masquerading as physical ones!