Wanted, Needed, Loved

“A Prayer Addressing All Hungers” by Debra Smith

We are hungry

We are eating our daily bread
and bowing our heads
and yet we are hungry

We are thanking the farmer
and the farm worker
and yet we are hungry

We are speaking in spaces
for food that is healthy
and still we are hungry

We are tiring of slogans that say
Feed the Children
and mean feed the children
leftovers

We are hungry for something
that feeds more than bodies

We are hungry for help
Help us oh you who apportion the funds
Find in your hearts the child who you were
who would share with a friend
free and friendly
Lead us not into meanness

For we are the hungry
We want the loaves
and the fishes
the water
and the wine
of sweet justice for all

We are hungry

Whenever I log onto “Facebook” it asks me “What is on your mind Danny”. On Monday morning I replied “There’s absolutely nothing on my mind. This would be good except I need to think of something to explore this week…Any ideas?”

Well, I was amazed by the response. I know some wonderful and interesting people. I spent Monday working on a funeral and a few other things. At the end of the day I read what had been posted and I just marvelled at the responses. They offered me such fruits for after all it is by our fruits that we are known.” By Tuesday the phrases “To be wanted, needed and loved” was singing in my heart. What are our wants and needs? How do we respond to them and those of others? Is it from fear or love? For it matters as it from these that the world will see us and recognize.

In recent days we have seen a response to perceived needs in a less than healthy and dare I say sane manner. Chaos and panic buying at our petrol stations, for fear that petrol is about to run out. There have been similar reactions over the last 18 months. There is much anxiety around, people feel uncertain and insecure. I was talking with a woman at the gym the other morning. We often talk, she knows I am a minister. She has trouble with anxiety and that morning everything was irritating her, every sound was splitting right through her head. At least she spoke and as she did you could see her anxiety easing. The admittance there was a problem and the connection helped her. Another friend has also been struggling with anxiety these last few days, brought on by concerns for both of her parents. She is doing all she can, but it is not easy. There is a great deal of anxiety around at this time of uncertainty.

This all got me thinking about our human needs. I don’t just mean what we want as individuals, but our actual needs. How we fulfill and realise them. I’m not just thinking as individuals but as people who live in community with one another. I suspect that our most basic need might be this. So often people feel isolated and disconnected and the last 18 months has not helped with this.

Exploring our human needs is not a new subject. There are many theories as to what they are and how we feed them. During the middle years of the 20th century American psychologist Abraham Maslow suggested a hierarchy of needs which he illustrated as a kind of pyramid of needs.

At the bottom of the pyramid are our basic physiological needs for food, water, rest. At the next level are safety needs for security and shelter. After that come our needs for belonging and love, intimacy and friendship. The need for sex, as most of us know, comes only after we’ve eaten and rested and are in a warm, dry, safe place. Nearing the top of the pyramid come our esteem needs: finding self-worth through our external accomplishments and the affirmation of others. At the very top of the pyramid is self-actualisation, or reaching our full creative potential. That’s the part of our lives, after we’ve taken care of all of our other needs, in which we can begin to make meaning of our lives, find our place in the universe, and understand the impact we’ve had on the world and the people we love. Maslow later expanded on this suggesting that we also have a need beyond self-actualisation. Recognising a need that transcends the confines of self, reaching a stage beyond in which we seek the fulfilment of others, we an acknowledge our responsibilities to help others.

I think Maslow’s pyramid is helpful, but a bit like the stages of grief it does seem somewhat simplistic and life just aint like that. We all thirst and yearn and hunger for things in life, including spiritually. We are not merely physical beings who need our physical, psychological and emotional needs met. In some ways the spiritual hunger and yearning can be the primary one. I have a friend who wrote a PHD on the Irish in Manchester. It was an attempt to explode a few myths and he did. One thing that stands about the Irish and particular Catholic communities in the nineteenth century was that despite the incredible levels of poverty they were able to raise incredible amounts of money to build beautiful ornate churches. It seems that their spiritual needs were important to them, along with other needs of the wider community. They did not see their needs as being purely individualistic, which is perhaps the curse of the current age.

Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung also recognise deep more spiritual needs. It took an interesting view on addiction and human desire suggesting that they are ultimately a spiritual yearning, a longing for another dimension beyond the material plane. In a letter to Bill W, one of the founders of AA, just before Jung died he wrote about a client, who was a part of the Alcoholics Anonymous story, stating that "His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God." Interestingly salvation for the alcoholic is not purely an individual thing.

So many folk are thirsting for wholeness Perhaps our yearning, our wants, our needs are an expression of a perceived lack of something; a sense that something is missing, that we are experiencing an emptiness. And that there is a possibility for fulfilment if only we can become clear what the lack is really all about. This is hunger so many feel, wherever they are Maslow’s perceived pyramid. Those who hunger for food hunger for wholeness just as much as those who feel they are achieved their physical and emotional needs.

In “The Book of Awakenings” Mark Nepo seems to agree, he writes “I believe there is a dimension of the inner life that is as imperative and equivalent as food and shelter. Without the fulfillment of these basic inner needs, we are just fed and sheltered bodies void of life. Without love, truth, and compassion, all the comforts of modern life don’t matter, because we are simply reduced to biological machines, not even as present as animals.”

If we only live a life where our basic needs are met first, we will never take the risk to live the best life we can. We will certainly not live from love. We will feel we need to eliminate all the external troubles before we can truly live our lives. Well, there will always be external troubles. Perhaps not a world wide pandemic and all kinds of shortages, but other troubles, that stop us being what we can be in this world and giving what we have for the good of all. We will not live in and from love, we will live from fear until the day comes when we do not live at all.

This is not to say that the basic needs aren’t vitally important. Of course they are. Without basic shelter and food, there is no security. There are enough people in this world struggling just to survive. That said just because they are struggling to survive it does not mean that they are not living the lives that they can, living spiritually alive.

Besides which if we live lives aiming at material security first we may find that this is another hunger, another addiction, that can never be satisfied. We might start to believe that we can never have enough petrol, or toilet paper, or shoes, or cars or holidays in the sun, or whatever it is that we think makes our lives worth living.

We can begin to live from love right now, whether our other needs have been fully met or not. As Nepo writes: “Spend whatever you can afford on making love work, bringing true into being, and allow generosity and compassion to flourish. This is more altruistic. It is necessary to be fully alive. It’s part of the wood that keeps that inner fire burning.”

So what is that really need in life? Well I suspect it is a sense that we are wanted need and loved. The problem is that if we simply go seeking that, it is another feeling that can never satisfied, not wholly. Instead what I suspect is needed is for us to become people who invite others to realise that they are wanted, needed and loved as they, exactly as they are in this moment. What the world needs is more people who instead of grasping at everything for fear that someone else will get it; become people who will give of themselves, who will offer the hand of acceptance and love and invite the other as they are, exactly as they. You do not need to be the perfect self actualised individual to achieve this. It can begin right here right now, you can offer such love, before you reach any summit.

We seem so focused on reaching some imagined place or idealised state. We do not need to wait until we have reached Maslow’s self-actualised state before going beyond the limitations of self, to that to a stage in which we seek the fulfilment of others and finally acknowledgement of our responsibilities to help others. We will never reach that stage if all we are seeking is self-actualisation, why because it will still be all about us.

The journey is the gift, there is no real end, this gift is in living this way now. If we live with love in our hearts we might just find our most basic needs being met and those of others too. We might just begin to live a life where we truly realise that we are wanted, needed and loved as we are, exactly as we are in this moment.

Below is a video devotion based on the material in this "Blogspot"