hunger
this week, i began reading rowan williams’ “passions of the soul”. what a wise, brilliant book…
“For Gregory, desire never leaves us, simply because there cannot be anything that finally satisfies us. We are so constituted that we are always in need of fulfilment, never attaining it in the sense of possessing what we most deeply need. If we are growing in spiritual maturity and discernment, what we desire is always to go on growing and to go on desiring. The mistake is to want to stop wanting – to desire to be satisfied so that I shall not have to desire any more, because I now have what before I lacked. I identify something, some object, which I believe will bring me a sense of greater completion: this will bring the fulfilment I lack, and when I have acquired it or mastered it, I don’t need any longer to orient myself towards it.”
and then i listened to a lovely interview of helena tulva, an estonian composer.
finally i began reading alexander schmemann’s “for the life of the world”.
“Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger of our life is God. All desire is finally a desire for Him. To be sure, man is not the only hungry being. All that exists lives by “eating.” The whole creation depends on food. But the unique position of man in the universe is that he alone is to bless God for the food and the life he receives from Him. He alone is to respond to God’s blessing with his blessing
and
The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him. The world was created as the “matter,” the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament
Men understand all this instinctively if not rationally. Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence. A meal is still a rite—the last “natural sacrament” of family and friendship, of life that is more than “eating” and “drinking.” To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that “something more” is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.”
