Hunger

"Faith is not a notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting or magnetic desire of Christ, which as it proceeds from a seed of the divine nature in us, so it attracts and unites with its like."

—William Law

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled" (Mt. 5:6). That note of hunger at the heart of the Beatitudes resonates with such feeling, such longing. What is it to live inside a longing that strong and deep, to ache for a fulfillment that may never arrive, at least in the perfect expression implied by the word "righteousness?" The gospel promises fulfillment, a satisfaction of that hunger. But it is not yet fully realized, at least not in our conscious awareness: those who hunger and thirst will be satisfied. Christian prayer lives in this place of tension and paradox, in the knowledge that everything has been promised to us, everything given to us in Christ, and that we are sometimes able to taste this and know it, but that our experience and awareness of this mystery remains (often) partial and obscure.

In a talk Thomas Merton gave to the community at Redwoods Monastery toward the end of his life, he struggled to articulate his own sense of the hunger, and the deep fulfillment, that lay at the heart of prayer. He was enough of an Augustinian to acknowledge the significance of hunger in prayer (God's very presence kindling a desire for relationship in the heart of the seeker). Yet, he wanted to dispel the notion that prayer is only hunger, that we are always only seeking, never satisfied, and to question the habits of prayer and ways of understanding God that leave us perpetually starved. This is what happens, Merton argued, when one applies a technological model of horizontal progress to the life of prayer, in which one begins at a certain point and moves to another and then another, achieving incremental gains but always left standing before an endlessly receding horizon. "That," he claimed, "is not the way to build a life of prayer. In prayer we discover what we already have. You start from where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize you are already there. We already have everything but we don't know it and don't experience it. Everything has been given to us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already possess."

The essays in this issue of Spiritus all grapple, in one way or another with this enduring paradox: the undeniable fruitfulness of hunger, in particular the space it opens up within human consciousness where the deep longing for God can be kindled and brought to awareness, and the reality of fulfillment and satisfaction, not only in a far distant future, but often in the very moment when hunger is awakened in the soul. They also raise important questions about how to understand the range of influences—social, cultural, psychological, political—that shape the hunger for God and account for its diverse expressions in human experience.

Anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann's essay considers the striking and unexpected convergence in contemporary American society between the upsurge of interest in intense prayer experience and the increasing number of cases of dissociative identity disorder being reported. The relationship between these phenomena is far from clear, and the author refrains from making any simple, reductive argument that would lead one to think of prayer as a kind of pathology. But she does want to consider certain questions arising from the possible correlation between these phenomena. For example, why it is that certain cultural-historical moments seem to bring with them an increased attention both to intense spiritual experience and expressions of psychological dissociation? Also, can the psychological mechanism of "absorption," common to both intense experiences of prayer and certain forms of clinical personality disorder, help to shed light on this surprising convergence? And can a consideration of such questions help us to arrive at a better understanding of why Americans' hunger for prayer seems to have become so acute at this particular historical...