Spiritual Hunger

"If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you will not have life in you."

Let us listen to a metaphorical tale written by Friedrich Nietzsche. In the tale, Nietzsche describes a man running into the middle of a marketplace at the noon hour holding high a lit lantern crying out to the busy masses, “Where is God? Where is God?” The crowd pauses long enough to take in this strange spectacle and to ridicule him. The man smashes the lantern against the cobble stones and declares, “God is dead!” and he laments that he and the crowd are guilty of the murder, responsible for taking a sponge that has wiped away the horizon.

Nietzsche might have been the father of modern atheism, but his is one of the first voices to cry out to believers for honesty. It was Nietzsche’s deepest desire to know God, but he was desperately seeking him among the believing so-called religious people, only to come away emptier than before. What has happened to the honest experience of God that once so framed the whole of society?

There is undoubtedly a basic hunger for the spiritual in us. Such a hunger is and always has been worldwide, even among the so-called atheists. We may even venture to say that such a hunger has caught up with the empty promises of industrialization and capitalism.

Thomas Merton, the American Cistercian monk and author, embodied that hungering quest in his auto-biographical sketch, The Seven Storey Mountain, which surprised the world and himself with its raging success in 1947. His story spoke to a hungering world. His testimony resounded throughout East and West in the details of his conversion and transformation. The world accompanied his anguished search long after the publication of his work and felt the pangs of emptiness at his early and tragic death—a death coming on the brink of his rendezvous with the East.

It would seem that there has been a swell of voices in the last two centuries—voices announcing the arrival of a new world, a globalization to come with all its potential, all of its problems, and all of its hunger. To each of these potentials, problems and hungers, the Gospel rises ever new. Jesus proclaims, "I am the Bread from heaven." For the last few Sundays we have been reflecting from John 6, to conclude next Sunday with the words of Peter, "Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." Jesus, the Word of God and the Bread of God, is the nourishment for the hungering world; he gives himself to nourish us: symbolically and sacramentally in the eucharist. But receiving the eucharist is meaningless and profitless if we fail to live what we celebrate. Does the eucharist satisfy our spiritual hunger? Or are we indifferent to God and His things both within us and around us? It is said indifference is the opposite of love; and indifference is the most deadly poison of our times. Indifference is the silent killer of Christianity; many Christians (though they come to church) have stopped expecting anything from the eucharist or from God. (If you don't believe this statement, try looking around in the church during the Sunday Mass. I'll be happy to be wrong!)

But the major question is this: Where am I? Have I given in to indifference? Or do I believe truly that God can nourish my inner life? We must take our religion out of the church into our hearts, and also bring it into the market place.