Deep Hunger...
Just so you get the quote again...
"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC
C.S. Lewis was criticized for writing The Screwtape Letters during WWII, his critics hollering that he ought to be writing more serious fare during such dangerous times. These days, seems that most bloggers are going on about political fireworks, and I sit here pondering (some might say navel-gazing) over some vague sense of the world's deep hunger, whatever that might be.
What is that deep hunger?
I love complexity, but today, it seems more simple. I want to say we're all lonely, we're all looking, we're all on the hunt for something intangible, and we're fairly convinced we're not going to find it in the material world. Postmodernism questions the whole notion of civilization, wondering whether the riches of first world living is really any "better" than third world poverty. Sure, more comfortable, more peaceful, more sated, but in the end, does that material affluence bring us any closer to fulfilling whatever it is we humans are hungry for?
We hunger for connection, for shared experience, for that sensation that says we are not alone. I'm convinced we all share the knowledge that something is wrong with things. (Otherwise why the shouting?) We Christians call it sin, and it devastates us, breaks our backs, and once we're lying there, though we tell ourselves otherwise, it is truly impossible to get back up without help. We're hungry for relief, for a touch of comfort, for a literal and figurative piece of bread.
I'm going to follow Dallas Willard here: the ills of the world, both global and personal, begin with wrecked inner lives, the action choices we make. And by wrecked I mean damaged, broken incrementally over time, or perhaps all at once in a desperate assault. Some brokenness is easy to spot, some more difficult, but it is a condition we all share. We hide it, true enough, flash our best smiles at each other, and yet, at some point along the way, we face the mirror, see the years etching themseves onto our wrinkling skin, spirits haunted by intimations of what's possible, what we might have been or might still be.
In this condition, who will love us? That is, I think, the deep hunger, the question that Buechner is calling us to respond to. Can't anyone love? Can't love be given whatever the deep gladness of your heart is? Whether you sit in a writer's group, or in a creative meeting with clients, or in a sports bar, can't you love?
Ahhhh...not that easy.
With each passing day, love becomes--in my mind--more miraculous. "The miracle of Love." (Now there's a tired phrase if ever there was one.) But the miraculous is truly that, the breaking in of some force into the world bringing a change, a transformation that is just not possible without it's impetus, it's wild energy.
Yep, that's it. Dull, boring, mundane though it may be. What we're hungry for is the love of God, and the touch of some human being through which it flows.
Buechner wants us to be that one...
...hungry for the bread of life...
2:45:47 PM 
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