Happy March! I have three items to mention before this month’s essay.
My husband, TJ, lied to me last week. He was conducting an experiment and you judge the results. One word: scary. Listen to this podcast episode (and many more) from TJ’s radio show on Apple | Spotify | Web
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(one more actually.) I just finished my final draft of my book. Pre-order details are coming soon. (I am much more excited about this than these few sentences would indicate!)
hungry; satisfied
I am tired of politics. I am tired of people having terrible ideas and fitting them into one hundred and twenty-two characters like a well-played game of Tetris. They press a button and do absolutely nothing while the world reacts to their ideas like it’s an actual lion that has wandered into their sleeping child’s bedroom. I am tired of hearing a pretty good idea and then hearing another pretty good idea that is diametrically opposing and wondering which is better. I am tired of people asking if a person can vote blue or red or purple or any color, you pick, and be a person of faith. I am tired of churches that look like political rallies. Like Jesus is on the ballot. He isn’t; He simply is. Long before there were ballots and long after they are gone, He is.
I often feel like burying my head in my children. I touch a nose, a curl, scratch a skinny back, and I am brought to reality. When I was very sad and felt something deeper than loneliness—bereft, really, which means the state of having lost something; deprived of something needed, wanted, or expected—I took a long drive to the beach just to bury my feet in the cool sand and hope that the waves would say something useful. My own thoughts were circular, reminding me only of what I already knew: I miss him very much. He isn’t coming back. Why can’t he stay?
But the ocean introduces new thoughts and they mingle with my own. This sand feels good on my feet, I decide, noticing almost despite myself that the world has some beauty and shine still. The sound of the water feels meditative; it is a collie barking and circling the sheep of my mind—my thoughts braying and afraid—ushering them forward, onward, somewhere else. The sand is still cool, it feels nice, the ocean is a homecoming, I will be okay. These are pieces of evidence that simply have to be turned in to the high court of my own mind also. (Along with the loneliness, the resentment and bitterness that campaign for my allegiance, too, of course.)
My first thought of the day is usually hunger. A very good breakfast awaiting me will get me out of bed a little sooner. When TJ and I lived in New York City, I’d wake up Saturday mornings to the nutty smell of bubbly, hot oatmeal inviting me to the kitchen. (I don’t mean anything that comes out of a microwave, either. I mean good, steel cut oats that take time on a stove before ever finding their way to a spoon.) I wouldn’t have so much as even offered to the new day an audible word yet, and my man had already made us breakfast. He’d always hand me the bowl with the most blueberries and we’d eat in joyful companionship. The act of eating, breaking the night’s fast together, transforming from those who are hungry to those who are satisfied right next to each other, doing it casually, even, like the act of being satisfied, fed, filled over and over again isn’t a miracle itself. Like it’s just breakfast.
Hunger and satisfaction meet me one after the other, both trying to convince me they are the theme. And they are both right, both truth tellers in their own right. Hunger, always; whether I feel it or not, whether I mask it with sugar or scrolling or shopping or sleeping or not. Hunger comes first, wakes me up gleefully with a stabbing thought of what I need. It plays its sonorous thrum, keeps the tap tap tap of constant pangs within, and I cannot help but acknowledge that I am. I am hungry—my body, my mind, my soul, my spirit. Tragedy can be a gift—albeit, a terrible one—because it lifts the thin veil we’d never even seen, revealing how hungry we are. It tells the truth when so much of the world is a trick, an advertisement trying to get us to quickly—don’t think!—sign the bottom line.
There is a letter in the New Testament in which the author reminds us of our state, writing:
“You brag, ‘I’m rich, I’ve got it made, I need nothing from anyone,’ oblivious that in fact you’re a pitiful, blind beggar, threadbare and homeless.” (Revelations 3:17)
Oblivious to the fact that I am hungry. Often my first thought of the day (I need food; I need) is the truth.
Author and professor Benjamin Myers writes:
Every day, morning and night, I hunger. The stuff of my life is hunger, need, lack. Affluence and technology might blind me to my need, but a morning without food is enough to show me the truth of what I am. I live by lack; God lives by fullness. I am only hunger; God is only food. (Salvation in my Pocket, Benjamin Myers)
So hunger is the theme.
But then I feel the coolness of the sand on my feet. It is grace. I touch my youngest daughter’s curls, they bounce, they twirl, they dance. I get to feed my daughters. Late at night under one blanket, I get to twine my fingers around my husband’s own. I get to open the Psalms and find ancient text that feels like a buoy, like “a signpost pointing into the fog” as scholar, theologian, and bishop N.T. Wright puts it. I get to wonder about angels, imagine them winged and wonderful around me. I get to read a text from a dear friend: the doctor said they don’t understand it, but the diagnosis has miraculously changed, disappeared…I get to partake in the Eucherist, in communion with God because He loves humanity deeply enough to get on our level, see the world through our eyes, itch and burp and, as a Baby, even needed His diaper changed too. It is an astonishing thing to behold, even more astonishing to get to believe. I get to eat, every day. From books, from plates, from friendships, from all the thoughts and words and ideas of God that gather like a force towards me and for me. It is the word philanthropia that early Christians used: God’s love of humanity; but let’s zoom in a thousand feet: God’s love of me. I am satisfied again and again. It is as the Psalmist writes, “My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness…” (Psalm 63:5)
The psalmist also writes:
I hold on to you for dear life…
(I hunger; I need.)
…And you hold me steady as a post. (Psalm 63:8)
(I am held, safe, satisfied, home.)
So the theme of my life is satisfaction, then.
Or is it the truth of how weary I am of the shallow promises politics and everybody who wants my money throws at me. They offer food with no substance, they are hunger makers. I grow so used to their darts—to my constant stepping and dodging and stepping and dodging—that I start to think this is just the way I walk now, the way I’ve always walked.
Or is the theme both the waves and the ebb; is it the rotation of the earth, the sun and the shadows that both get their reign. Is it the truth of my own hunger that constantly draws me back to my Source to be satisfied.
For I am satisfied.
(Until I remember my hunger tomorrow.)
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Wow, I just wrote along similar lines and am now reading what you wrote. I feel like Christians especially, for some reason struggle to hold the idea "there can be two VERY BAD options and zero good ones for president". But this year, we have finally hit an all-time low, just like we did when the same two candidates ran 4 years ago. God help us all