hunger

[prismaticbleed]

There is a sweetness to the Holy Eucharist that nothing, absolutely nothing, can compare to.

I've found that physical hunger means nothing to me. I was singing in church this morning and my stomach was utterly hollow and aching, feeling like a small vacuum in my abdomen, and I didn't care. Oddly it was even comforting, to know my body was empty-- clean, pure, untouched. Hunger doesn't even register on my radar. I'm aware that my body doesn't have food and could use some, but does it feel like I want food? No. Never, actually. "Hunger" is a foreign concept to me, when I'm sane at least. I only ever experience hunger while bingeing, when my body is desperately trying to swallow as much as possible before violently puking it right back up. It makes no sense. To me, hunger is ravenous and destructive and frightening and frankly nonsensical. It has nothing to do with health or nourishment.

So when people say, "hunger for God," "hunger and thirst for righteousness," "taste the goodness of the Lord," those phrases don't make sense to me on a physical level, and that upsets me. I want them to make sense in a way that earthly hunger and food never can, and weirdly I am in the perfect place for that, as I have been given the paradoxical blessing of not understanding how to be physically hungry.

And therefore, I very much know what it feels like to be spiritually starving.

There IS a sort of hunger I experience and it is ONLY in my heart and it is UNBEARABLE. But it's also strangely welcome, for I know it is a yearning for God that WILL push me to seek Him with all my strength and energy.

To fuse this spiritual hunger with my reception of the physical Eucharist, I can unite body and soul in yearning for Christ and thus experience that longing and fulfillment on TWO levels, which is literally impossible for me in ALL other respects, and honestly it should be like that for all peoples in the first place. But I can tangibly and actively attest to the impossibility of fulfillment outside of Christ. I've become so numbed to the basic physical drive of hunger that even if I ate an entire grocery store I'd still be starving and sobbing. I know this. And I know that if I didn't eat for a week I wouldn't look for food unless I thought I was literally having a heart attack, which happened last week by the way, in which case I just drank a bottle of Pedialyte and prayed for mercy. But in all of those cases there's no satisfaction. There's no feeling of relief or health. It's just a frightening, painful, unpredictable chore.

Not so with Christ. Christ IS the ONLY True Food and I have been able to KNOW THIS in a very unusually tangible sense and I THANK GOD for that.