God's Answer (Fulfillment of All Longing 2)
Taste and See
Yesterday we reflected on the fact that, as Bruce Springstien puts it, “Everybody’s got a hungry heart.” We all have a powerful desire within us that we call “eros,” that is, a hunger or erotic desire for infinite truth, beauty, and goodness, a hunger for God. We have this hunger and desire because we have been designed by God to be filled by nothing less than Him. The aching desire man experiences is, says Pope Benedict, like a signature imprinted with fire in his soul and body by the Creator himself. Faced with this desire, this eros, we have only three options: we can deny our desires and go on a starvation diet; or we can become an addict while we try to satisfy our hunger on a Fast Food diet; or we can become an aspiring mystic that feasts on the Banquet of God through prayer. Those are the options: a starvation diet; fast food and nothing more; or taste and see how good God is…
The Starvation Gospel
The Starvation Gospel is for those who believe Christianity is about not breaking laws and following the rules. To do this we need to deny all our desires, say no to our passions because these lead us to break the rules. This is the “rule obsessed” gospel that tries to convince us that desire itself is “bad” and needs to be repressed, denied, or otherwise killed. This kind of “legalism” and “moralism” is the (tragically false) version of Christianity. This is not our faith. Christianity is primarily a religion of longing, longing for the complete fulfillment of all our good desires. Christianity is not the religion that condemns eros, it is the religion that redeems eros. Christ came not to destroy our desires but to direct them to their true fulfillment, union with God. Oh, there are still rules to follow. The moral law is there to direct our hunger toward its true fulfillment so that we stop settling for less. At the root of every sin is the idea that the satisfaction of the deepest desires of my heart is totally up to me. It is not up to me, I can’t be satisfied by anything less than God because I was designed to be satisfied by Him.
The Fast Food Gospel
The hunger of eros eventually becomes so painful that the prospect of relief – wherever it can be found – trumps all fear of “breaking the rules.” This is why the secular culture’s “fast food gospel” – the promise of immediate gratification through reckless indulgence of desire – inevitably wins large numbers of converts from the “starvation diet gospel.” The Fast Food Gospel makes us all addicts who indulge in finite things that cannot satisfy our hunger for the Infinite, because they were meant to be filled by God. C.S. Lewis writes: “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us ... We are far too easily pleased” (C.S. Lewis, WG, p. 26).
The Banquet
Our last option is to become an aspiring mystic feasting on the banquet. We know the banquet is real because Jesus has revealed, and we hunger for this banquet with hope, with the certainty of feasting on the banquet if we persevere in prayer. If this banquet is real, then we do not need to repress our desires in the starvation diet or become an addict in the fast food approach. We can learn how to pray because prayer is becoming a longing for God. And the more we long for God, the more our desires and actions and whole being are directed to Him. Prayer is all about redirecting our desires to the only thing that will satisfy – God.
Our desires have been put there by God to lead us to Him. There is a banquet that corresponds to our hunger and the King is saying, “Come, Come.” (Mt 22:1-4) “The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. … Behold, I have prepared my banquet … and everything is ready; come to the feast”.
Christianity is the religion that proclaims “blessed” those who hunger and thirst, for they shall be satisfied (see Mt 5:6; Lk 6:21).
Listen, that You May Have Life
The basic proposal of Christianity is that there is a glorious and infinitely satisfying banquet that corresponds to our deepest hunger. If this is true, it is indeed “Good News”! Saint Teresa of Avila, in her Commentary on the Song of Songs writes: “The King seems to refuse nothing to the Bride! Well, then, let her drink as much as she desires and get drunk on all these wines in the cellar of God! Let her enjoy these joys, wonder at these great things, and not fear to lose her life through drinking much more than her weak nature enables her to do. Let her die at last in this paradise of delights; blessed death that makes one live in such a way”
In the end we only have three choices about what to do with our hunger, our deepest desires: we will either become a stoic who represses all desire; an addict who tries to fill his infinite desire with finite pleasure that can never satisfy but only enslave; or an aspiring mystic who longs for God through prayer and receives from Him in proportion to his desire.
· “I am the Lord your God … open wide your mouth and I will fill it” (Ps 81:11).
· “All you who are thirsty, come to the water! You who have no money, come receive grain and eat; Come without paying and without cost, drink wine and milk! Why spend your money for what is not bread; your wages for what fails to satisfy? Heed me and you shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare. Come to me heedfully, listen, that you may have life” (Is 55:1-3).
· “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst” (Jn 6:35).