It’s remarkable how often I’m thirsty & don’t know I’m thirsty.
I’ll eat four packs of Sour Patch Kids before I notice that they’re not what my body wanted. Sour Patch are fantastic, but they aren’t helpful it you’re thirsty.
I spend a lot of time practicing listening to my body as an adult, since diet culture, purity culture, and capitalism conspire to make us ignore our signals of hunger & thirst & tiredness. Relearning how to want is a lot of work. Relearning how to listen to my body’s signals - aha! this one is sleepiness! aha! this is hunger! - feels like training an enthusiastic and kind of dumb hound puppy, all eagerness but not a lot of subtlety.
Re-learning is hard because the options are fraught with Moral Weight. How can we tell the difference between hunger and thirst, between craving a Sour Patch Kid and craving a glass of cold water, when diet culture says that it’s always bad to want a Sour Patch Kid, and whenever you’re hungry you’re just thirsty?
Discerning our body’s signals can be overwhelming & confusing. Discerning our soul’s signals can be even harder.
Evangelicalism, like diet culture, made discerning spiritual hunger difficult. You don’t want a husband, you want God! You don’t want to have fun, you want God! All our legitimate human hungers were spiritualized. This is so confusing for souls! When we’re told all our longings are spiritual, it’s hard to discern where our spiritual longing actually lives.
And there is so much spiritual longing. And we’ve filled it with so much other stuff. I eat a lot of spiritual Sour Patch Kids, because I’m thirsty for something I don’t understand. “Why spend your money on what is not bread, your labor on what does not satisfy?” Isaiah asks. Maybe because we aren’t exactly sure what is bread anymore, or we just don’t know what will satisfy.
To know what you want, and to know what will fill the wanting, is a hard spiritual discipline.
May we learn to listen to our bodies and our souls this Advent, against the noisy voices telling us we can’t trust ourselves, and our wantings are not reliable.
God, bring us home to our wanting this season. Bring us home to You.
#AdventWord from yesterday is “thirsty.”