Coming Clean

Hunger and Heaven

I got to thinking today about how everything we do is driven by a kind of hunger. We may call it different things: desire, drive, ambition, sympathy, motivation… I don’t care what you call it, but that impetus to “do” is hunger – an animal-like impulse that needs to be fed.

Our animal needs are the most obvious of these hungers: eating, drinking, and even bowel movements! We are moved to do something to satisfy the hungers. The thought that the desire for bowel movements are hunger amuses me greatly.

Anyways… as a person, my biggest hunger is to solve problems. I love it. Put a problem in front of me, and I’ll tinker with it until (1)I’m certain I cannot solve it given who I am or (2)I solve it. It’s what makes me a good software engineer. It’s what makes me a decent, albeit amateur, theologian.

When we consider the religions of the world, all the problems they recognize stem from hunger. The hungry poor, the homeless, the sick, the ignorant – they’re people whose very existence are identified with hungers that need feeding. In the Bible, Adam’s sin was a hunger for the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but that he had a hunger at all suggests to me that he had other hungers, too – healthy ones that he healthily partook. But Jesus had a craving only to be obedient to God – a hunger that we know but, thanks to Adam, do not understand and so doomed corruption.

And the point of all this? Heaven. Where all our sorrows and needs will be wiped away – where hunger is only that thing which is getting fed and no longer something I move to feed. I don’t get that. We are by design hungry. Adam was created to hunger, to feed, and for a time be satisfied until hunger returned again. Jesus, too, hungered. He exhibited all the same animal hungers we have, and I imagine He had hungers of curiosities of His own. So why do I get the impression that most people think that when we get to heaven, we’re not going to experience hunger in some manner? The simplest and most common picture of heaven we get from the Christian-on-the-street is a mass of people sitting around the Camp-Fire that is God singing Kum-bay-ya – no cares, no worries, just a big party around God with nothing else on our minds let alone hungers.

If that’s the way it’s going to be, I suppose I’ll find that it feeds me… but it seems so antithetical to everything else so far – antithetical even to Adam prior to the Fall. I think that’s why I like Tolkien and Lewis so much: there are other Creations waiting to happen. Perhaps another war to be waged. Perhaps something even better than or just different from us!! I don’t know… but when I listen to the common Christian talk about heaven, I tend to get depressed. They talk about being somewhere else, apart from the good things we see and know here. It makes me lonely for here.

But I’ve never met a person who did not get wholly excited and awe-struck by the worlds and heavens of the likenesses in the minds and writings of Lewis and Tolkien. That’s the kind of place I think I’d like heaven to be. I’m sure whatever God has in mind will be great… but until I see it, I’ll just be left to wondering… secretly hoping for the Next Thing with More To Follow instead of The End… and getting depressed when I talk to the common Christian about heaven.