We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Hungry Hearts
Every human being with normal mental and emotional faculties longs for more. People typically associate their longing for more with a desire to somehow improve their lot in life—to get a better job, a nicer house, a more loving spouse, become famous, and so on. If only this, that, or some other thing were different, we say to ourselves, then we’d feel complete and happy.
The best word in any language that captures this hunger for more, according to C. S. Lewis, is the German word Sehnsucht (pronounced “zane-zookt”). It’s an unusual word that is hard to translate, for it expresses a deep longing or craving for something that you can’t quite identify and that always feels just out of reach. Some have described Sehnsucht as a vague and bittersweet nostalgia and/or longing for a distant country, but one that cannot be found on earth. Others have described it as a quasi-mystical sense that we are incomplete, combined with an unattainable yearning for whatever it is that would complete it.
Lewis saw Sehnsucht as reflective of our “pilgrim status.” It indicates that we are not where we were meant to be, where we are destined to be; we are not home. Lewis once wrote to a friend that “our best havings are wantings,” for our “wantings” are reminders that humans are meant for a different and better state. In another place he wrote:
“Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside is … the truest index of our real situation.”
I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important aspect of this Sehnsucht is a need to experience God’s perfect, unconditional love. A central aspect of what this means is that we long to know, in an experiential way, that we have unlimited or unsurpassable worth to God and that we are absolutely secure in this love and worth.
The degree to which we feel anything approximating this unconditional love, unsurpassable worth, and absolute security is the degree to which we feel fully alive and at home in the world. To the degree we don’t experience this, however, we remain hungry, out of place, and less than fully alive.
Sehnsucht is hunger for life.
We are made to perpetually share in a life in which we are perfectly and unconditionally loved, in which we experientially know we could not matter more to God than we already do, and in which we feel absolutely secure in this love and worth, for we know that nothing—including the loss of our biological life—could cause us to lose this life.
This hunger for life is the most fundamental driving force for our lives.
—Adapted from Benefit of the Doubt, pages 56-58
Image by Jordan McQueen.
Category: General
Tags: C.S. Lewis, Love, Spiritual Hunger
Related Reading

What God Requires
The reason we were created and what we are called to be is summed up in one word: love. The central defining truth of those who follow Jesus is that in Christ God ascribed unsurpassable worth to us, and thus the central defining mark of those who live in love is that they ascribe the…

Sermon Clip: How Christians Should Respond to Ferguson
In this clip from this weeks sermon, Greg Boyd comments on how Christians should respond to the events in Ferguson St. Louis and how that response should always be in love and to help heal both sides. The full sermon is here: http://whchurch.org/sermons-media/sermon/heart-smart-qa

What Kind of God Did Jesus Reveal?
The ReKnew Manifesto exists to encourage believers and skeptics alike to re-think things they thought they already knew – hence our name, Re-Knew. I am currently working through the theology of the Manifesto in a series of posts that began a couple of months ago. Over the last few posts, we have been looking at the…

Sermon Clip: Brain Reign
In this short clip, Greg Boyd discusses the 3 parts to who we are to help understand the brains role. What does role does the mind, body, and spirit play in who we are? In the full sermon we look at the New Testament teaching on reigning over the relational brain. Understanding how God wired…

Loving Enemies in the Day of ISIS
The following excerpt from Myth of a Christian Religion discusses Jesus’ command to “turn the other cheek.” Whatever our response to the persecution of Christians in the world, we must take this passage seriously. While this excerpt does not tell us exactly how to respond, it can be used to shape our attitude and stance…

Sermon Clip: Dear Abby
In this short sermon clip, Greg Boyd discusses Matthew 7. The infamous “plank in your own eye vs a speck of dust in your neighbors. He clarifies what this verse means when you have a close friend with an issue that you are helping them with. In the full sermon of Heart Smart our team…