Still hungry
I'm re-reading The Pilgrim's Regress at the moment. Still lots of words (and languages!) that I don't understand, but perhaps a few of the concepts have become clearer since the last time. There is a passage in it (and in many other of Lewis' books) which talks about the idea that satisfaction only comes when a desire is truly filled: that if you are truly thirsty, then a cup of water will satisfy you. If the water does not satisfy you, then it was not what you really wanted in the first place, and maybe thirst (or thirst alone) is not your true desire. Or, as he puts it, "If all a man wants is food, how can he be dissatisfied when the food arrives?".
Why do I care about all this? Isn't it self-evident? Well, maybe. But currently I'm thinking about it in the context of eternity. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God has placed eternity in the hearts of men, but that they (we!) don't understand, cannot fathom what he has done. Do you ever feel like that? Like you are hungry for something you can't quite define? And you can't quite define it because that hunger has never been fully satisfied - you've never been to that place where you can look back on an experience or a time and say, ah, now this is what I have been hungry for all this time. We can know, from our last experience of chocolate or brussel sprouts whether this time, they are likely to be what we are really wanting. If the last time our desire for chocolate was fulfilled by brussel sprouts, it is unlikely that what we wanted was chocolate. And, most emphatically, vice versa.
But how are we to know what the hunger is if we can't fill it? It has no name, unless the many faces of worldly measures that we turn to are to be given as it's name. This would not be helpful: as much as saying "Today is the date that my friend was not born on" does not help you to know his birthday. So how are we to find and name this hunger? Surely we, and all mankind "cannot fathom what God has done, from beginning to end" (push the read more button below...)
- Posted by flyingkiwi on 18/06/2006.
- flyingkiwi's site
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