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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Spiritual Hunger

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

I never learned how to be hungry as a child.

In the course of human history, this fact makes me a fortunate rarity. Hunger, when I have known it, has largely been either volitional or circumstantial, never existential. For this, I feel a deep and abiding sense of gratitude.

It has, nonetheless, left me at a certain disadvantage.

Thanks to my inherited build and metabolism, not to mention the circumstances of my birth, I have, throughout my life, mostly been able to eat as much as I wanted to, whenever I wanted to.

(I was always one of whom they said: Well, he has a nice body.)

Life happens. As the male body ages, it thickens around the middle. Chances are, I'll never have my Minoan waistline back again.

So I've had to learn how to let myself be hungry.

Mastery of hunger is a skill basic to the priest, the hunter, and the warrior. It's (ultimately) a matter of redirection. I've had to learn to say to my stomach “Yes, but...” and go on with what I consider to be the overriding priority. I won't say that it's been easy.

Fasting has always been part of the spiritual technology of the ancestors. It's a good technique for an overfed modern paganism to re-embrace. As fasting is to the body, so longing is to the heart and, properly used, one can intensify the other in order to achieve results beyond what either could accomplish alone.

I learned something interesting about myself during a recent 40-hour clear-liquids fast preparatory to a colonoscopy. (“A necessary evil,” said the pharmacist, shaking his head, as he looked at the doctor's prescription.) For a day and a half, I ate/drank nothing but green tea and vegetable broth.

I found that what I missed most about eating was not so much the feeling of satiation as it was the sensation of tasting. For a day and a half, at mealtimes I would sit down and sip my mug of hot vegetable broth. That was enough to keep me from feeling the endless ravine of deprivation that sometimes opens up at my feet during my annual Sundown-to Sundown fast before Samhain.

2022 being a Sabbatical year, I've already begun to prepare myself for this Summer's doings, when I will need to be at a physical and mental peak. (Hunger and longing again, hunger and longing.) A friend undergoing the same regimen recently texted: What is the chant for fasting? For of course there's a chant to strengthen resolve during hunger. Interestingly, it's the song belonging to the Ooser, the carved wooden mask that the Horned wears among His people in immemorial Grand Sabbat. It's a chant, profound in meaning, that asks: What is self?

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Learning Hunger

Among the many things that I learned from my family, there's one that I didn't.

How to be hungry.

I grew up in a time and place—O rarity of human history—where there was always enough food. So I never learned how to be hungry. I never had to.

Instead, I've had to teach myself.

Sometimes hunger is a matter of necessity: there's just no food. That's involuntary hunger.

But the longer that I walk the Old Ways, the more convinced I become that sometimes—for our own spiritual health—we need to take on voluntary hunger as well.

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Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs
Entering the New Year with Hunger

What aches within you to know the Divine
What fills your table of spiritual sustenance
To what ends will you go to sit at the table
Of your Divine Nature?

Does this hunger awaken you from the comfort of your slumber
Calling you to sit naked and vulnerable in the solitude of Sacred Space
And surrender in opening to the pervasive silence of Spirit?

Do you feel sorrow at the grains of wisdom spilled out
From bowls upturned in seeker's frantic search?

...
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