Hungering

What does a person long for?
For what do we reach?
And do we obtain?
Longing, reaching.
And for what?

To be alone.
By ourselves, with no one else.
Embraced within ourselves.
Being just who we are.
Alone.

Why then do we strive for other things?
We are alone, why is that not enough?
We hunger. And we eat.
We are ourselves, why is that not enough?
Do we hunger to be known, and loved?

In our hunger, we eat.
We do not have enough within ourselves to live.
Being alone with ourselves is it also not enough for us?
Is it that we cannot be alone with ourselves?
That we are not enough even for ourselves?

In embracing ourselves do we see more?
Is what we cannot see suggested?
And in seeing what is there and not known,
Do we long to know it?
To know what we cannot know alone.

And if we cannot be known alone,
With whom would we be known?
To be known by one like myself or different?
If different how would they know me?
If like me how will they know what I do not know.

Knowing me as not like them, what do they see?
Can they see me as I do not see me?
Or are they seeing what they do not know about them?
Is it also what I do not see about me?
Am I then known more in my differences?

Knowing me as I know me,
Can they who see me as they are, see all of me?
Can they see what I long to know and do not know?
Embracing what is known and loved do we not know it better?
Is knowing what we have known deepened in being known more?

Alone I am.
In solitude, I sit.
Embraced in the safe unknown.
Knowing I am more but afraid to know more.
Alone, longing and hungering and reaching.

I am different.
I am kin to you.
I am incomplete but good.
I am alone.
A question.

Can I be me and be all of me with you?
Can I be embraced in my safe unknown?
Knowing I am afraid can I be with you,
In my suggested difference?
In my familiar kinship?

Jim Raun
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, 2002
‘In the beginning was the Word… and the Word became flesh and dwells among us.
He came to his own, and his own did not know him.’
The Gospel of John 1

 

Comments

Here is a study on our drive to be independent and our need to be dependent. We are pulled strongly in both directions. And the question I ask here is our questions. No answers. We each must face this struggle for ourselves. So many ignore this struggle and compromise with what they find in their relationships. My suggestion is to face these questions enriches our experience and our experience of our relationships. The threat is we may choose to separate from some relationships as being too draining. And the opportunity is we may enrich other relationships by being more open to what we bring to it and what that relationship offers to us.