This isn’t Fogy who’s written this one.
*
Not the part that matters, anyway.
This is a boy’s voice — clear, unsure, and somehow wiser than most men I’ve known.
It comes from a time before me… and maybe beyond me.
My voice of the past.
So I’m not going to say much more.
Just this: I listened.
You should too.
Chapter Six – Hunger
From Through My Eyes As a Boy - Jesus imagined.
My life with these people is a strange one. I live with them and feel as one with them, yet I feel different. I am learning the ways of my people — I was born one of them, I am told — but there are many things that do not seem right.
A man who is harmed by another can inflict the same harm in return.
Are they not both criminals then?
Shouldn't he who harms be shown the error of his ways?
Shouldn't he who is harmed not learn the power of understanding and forgiveness, so that he might teach he who harmed him — and all those others who wish harm on others?
But no.
They all seem to hunger more and more for better things, even when they are fully satisfied.
I once gave a hungry man half my meal one day when my mother and I travelled to a neighbouring village. My mother smiled her approval, but a man next to us — who didn’t see her smile — began to scold me.
“Have you no shame, boy? Why do you dishonour your father and his hard work by giving that man the food you need?”
“But he is hungry,” I reply.
“Did he pay you?” the man asks.
“No,” I reply.
“Did he work for it? Did he do you a service?” he asks again.
“No,” I reply once more.
“Then he has no right to your food,” he states simply.
I look at him and study his face.
His look is triumphant — there is confidence in him, the kind that comes from understanding the simple laws of our people.
But as I look into him, I see that confidence wane, replaced by doubt, until his eyes leave mine.
“How can a man who has no work, who cannot work, live and eat and be warm, if our laws are so strict?”
“He must find a way,” he answers — less surely.
“Should we not share what we have when we have plenty? Or especially, when we have too much?”
His confidence returns.
“We must keep what we cannot use for the future. We work hard now so that we will never have to beg, go hungry, or be cold.”
The triumph is on the verge of returning.
“While those around us suffer and die?”
“They will die anyway. We will all die.”
He is beginning to tire of this discussion.
“And what is enough that is not too much?
You can never know your future. You may walk from here and fall dead to the earth — right now.
What then of your plenty?
What then of those who suffer and die so that you may have plenty — more than you will ever need?”
“It is my right,” he defends.
“It is our duty to help others.
To share our good fortune with others,
so that we all might live without suffering.”
I turn from him. And he is quiet.
When we left that place, the hungry man thanked me and moved on.
But the angry man just sat there, staring into nothing,
while tears streamed slowly down his cheeks.
I wiped at my own tears,
for I too was crying for him.
We often think of hunger as lack.
But the boy shows us it can be excess, too — a hunger to keep, to justify, to blind ourselves.
When you feed a stomach, it might be only one meal.
But when you awaken a conscience… that can last forever.
– Quinn te Samil
Literal hunger is a bodily lack, a need for sustenance. But when we say things like hunger for power, hunger for love, or hunger for meaning, we're using a metaphor — extending the idea of physical deprivation into the emotional or psychological realm.
ReplyDeleteThis figurative use taps into the same core feeling: an emptiness or absence that demands to be filled. Whether it's food or affection or success, the experience is of something missing — a gap that aches.
So even though hunger and anger don't share etymological roots, they often overlap in experience: both can arise from a lack — a body deprived, or a soul frustrated.