Afterwords: Unsatisfied Satisfaction
A Post-Sermon Reflection on the Second of Lent
This has been recorded for your convenience should you prefer to listen rather than read this reflection. The sermon, “Lent 3: A Hunger for God” will be posted on the All Souls Knoxville Podcast which can be found wherever you listen or on Buzzsprout page.
This is another “after-words,” words after the homily. Here I want to expand upon what I was saying towards the end of the homily on satisfaction because we are up against a paradox when speaking of “satisfaction.” On the one hand, part of Isaiah’s point is just how much of our lives we spend — literally “spend” — seeking satisfaction through things which do not satisfy.
“Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” (Isaiah 55:2a)
Who among us doesn’t understand this? Who hasn’t regretted a purchase not long after it arrived at our doorstep? A decision not long after it was made? The way we’ve spent our time? We can spend ourselves only to end up both unsatisfied and broke, financially or otherwise. The paradox we face, and one I was trying to get at in the message, is that when speaking about a hunger for God it is both the thing that completely satisfied and keeps us longing for more. We may reach posture of satisfaction, but our need for God grows when deeply satisfied by God. It is a sort of unsatisfied satisfaction. How can we speak well of this? I will draw from two sources which I think are really helpful in speaking about the simultaneous satisfaction and need for more satisfaction when it comes to our hunger for God. Let’s start with Søren Kierkegaard who writes:
Then in a beautiful sense the human heart will gradually (the grace of God is never taken by force) become more and more discontented—that is, it will desire more and more ardently, will long more and more intensely, to be assured of grace…With respect to the earthly, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less, the more perfect one is…in a human being’s relationship to God, it is inverted: the more he needs God, the more deeply he comprehends that he is in need of God, then the more he in his need presses forward to God, the more perfect he is…the secret of perfection: that to need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself, and that it is the saddest thing of all if a human being goes through life without discovering that he needs God.1
This is a truth we are confronted with during Lent: we need little in this world yet want more and are unsatisfied when we should be. On the other hand, with God there is always more to receive and therefore when we experience the sublime through the “touch of transcendence”2 we are left, and should be left wanting more because God is an ever flowing stream of pure Goodness. Yet we often settle for that which doesn’t ever satisfy rather the satisfaction that comes from God which opens us up to want more of God.
The second person who helps us here is Gregory of Nyssa, and we’ll draw on the work of theologian Kathryn Tanner to help us tease out some of the implications of Gregory’s idea.
Gregory had a concept which he referred to as “epectasis” which is really helpful here. Epectasis basically puts forward the idea that when the human soul receives God, the soul is then expanded to receive more of God. There is no way that we could ever — not in all eternity — receive the fullness of God, but our souls can be expanded to receive more and more and more. As Kathryn Tanner writes,
"Creation as non-divine also cannot receive at once all that God wants to give in this way. God's gifts come to it over the course of time in what God intends to be an unending expansion of its ability to receive created gifts from the Father's hands of Son and Spirit."3
She then brings Gregory into the conversation writing:
"Gregory of Nyssa puts forward his notion of epectasis, the creature's constant forward motion or journey beyond itself into the boundlessness of God's fullness as the creature's capacities are stretched by what it receives..."4
Given this, we can re-read Kierkegaard’s words regarding the need for God and understand why he writes of it as gift since since the person who, more and more, realizes their need for God, realizes that they hunger and thirst for more of God, do so because their souls are being stretched precisely to receive more and more.
Drawing on Gregory’s “epectasis,” Tanner says that humans have been uniquely created with a sort of “plasticity”5 to their souls. It is this pliability or plasticity that allows us to be shaped more and more into the image of God. Having been uniquely created with this pliability, however, leaves us susceptible to being shaped in negative way too. As we often say, “you are what you eat.” We are shaped by what we consume. So to return to Isaiah’s question, “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” when God provides a rich banquet of food and wine, and that banquet is God’s own self! So Gregory writes,
“Though we are changeable by nature, the Word wants us never to change for the worse; but by constant progress in perfection, we are to make our mutability [our plasticity or malleability] an aid in our rise to higher things, and so by the very changeability of our nature to establish it immutably in the good.”6
And so to return to the issue of satisfaction, there are two ways of being unsatisfied, the first is negative and the second, what I’ve been calling unsatisfied satisfaction, is a positive dissatisfaction. In the first sense, our souls are being shaped, or better misshaped by things other than God which cause a shrinking in the soul. We spend our lives consuming things that do not expand the soul but cause it to shrivel and thus remain deeply unsatisfied. But “the Word wants us never to change for the worse,” as Gregory says! So Isaiah invites us to come and taste the banquet of God which causes our souls to expand leaving us more satisfied than we could ever imagine yet desiring more of the God who will give without ceasing forever. In this case we are, as Paul says, “changed from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
During Lent we are examining what we eat in order to examine what we are becoming. The fast, in the end, is not a giving up for giving up’s sake, but rather a given up of that which may be causing our souls to shrink in order to consume the Word which causes our souls to expand and really live. As Joan Chittister reminds us:
“Lent enables us to face ourselves, to see the weak places, to touch the wounds in our own soul, and to determine to try once more to live beyond our lowest aspirations.”7
So even though Lent is about fasting, when Isaiah comes to us and says,
“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.”
We should respond, even as we fast:
“Therefore, let us keep the feast!”
Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1990), 303. Quoted in Peter Kline, Passion for Nothing: Kierkegaard's Apophatic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 103-104.
Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).
Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 42.
ibid., 42-43.
Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 40.
Gregory of Nyssa, From Glory to Glory, trans., Herbert Musurillo (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 216. Quoted in Tanner, Christ the Key, 40.
Joan Chittister, The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life, The Ancient Practice Series (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2009), 110.