“Hunger” for God

The Heaven!
My goal.
Where God was.
My only hunger.
Hunger that is not gluttony
but a necessity blessed by God,
who wants us to hunger for Him.

This writing is a fragment in which the Most Holy Mary said this to Maria Valtorta to comment on her part in the birth of Jesus (chap. 29.10). Even though it is only a sliver of the piece, it still has a value in itself. And it is also poetry: it actually contains such resonances that only a poem can contain, it trembles with uncontainable desire as only poetry can show. Many words from the New Testament echo in it: “Our homeland is in Heaven” (Phil 3:20); “Our Father who art in Heaven” (Mt 6.9); “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind” (Mt 22,37); “the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Mt11,11); “rather rejoice that your names are written in Heaven” (Luke 10:20), and the list could be very long.

The words present here concern all men, without exception, even if too many have forgotten it. We were created for Heaven and Earth would have been a gateway anyway. Going there would have been an ascending – as it was for Mary – but now, after the first sin, we must pass through the cross of death. Ours, but above all the death and resurrection of Jesus, so that the cross is salvific and redeeming for us. However, it is “the goal” for everyone. Not “a” goal, but “the” goal. And whoever does not choose it will remain an eternal failure, despite having freely rejected it.

And there is God. Not a cold statue to be worshiped, we don’t know how, but a Father who wants us part of himself. Mystery, sure. An impenetrable mystery to the point that Revelation doesn’t even try to describe it. It only goes so far as to tell us that we will be “equal to the angels and, being children of the resurrection, are children of God” (Lk 20:36). An infinite number of details are missing, which not even Jesus revealed to us, because today they would be incompressible for all of us. However, if we use a little of the reason we are gifted with, perhaps we understand what it means to “be one with God”. So as not to be suffocated by banal comparisons, it can be sensed through poetry, which however only expresses fragments of ineffable truths.

Mary says it is “my only hunger”. Human misery can be seen precisely in those men who have been successful in this world: they have been hungry for everything, but not for God; they have accumulated everything, from buttons to spaceships, but they have not filled themselves with God. Yet Jesus expressed it very well: “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mk 10.25). Death will take everything away: they were not hungry for God, they will not have God forever. Mary urges us to have this “strange” hunger; if by chance it doesn’t tighten our stomachs and hearts, if it doesn’t fit into our desires, then let’s ask for it and let’s do it strenuously!

This hunger is the only one that is truly “blessed” by God, because it enlightens us on the path to take and the goal to reach. This hunger always spurs us on. Let’s take time, space, company, that help us find and have this hunger; hunger that never satisfies, even though we are always abundantly satisfied. Because God is inexhaustible from any point of view.

A sick person finds it difficult to have an appetite for anything, also because if his memory makes his mouth water for things he enjoyed in the past, they have now become poison for him. But here the opposite is true. The sicker (sinners) we arethe more we should long for Him who is satiety for every hunger and thirst. Let’s ask and require this hunger, because it is the only one that will keep us on the true path despite all kinds of setbacks that may happen to us. Most Holy Mary showed us with her humble life how and what to do. Let’s follow her, leaving to her world its desires, its hopes and fantasies, that is, everything that will never satisfy us anyway.

And let us not forget the exhortation of Jesus in chapter 652: “And again I say to you: ”Take, take this work and ‘do not seal it’, but read it and have it read ‘for the time is near’ (John, Revelation, chap 22, v. 10) ‘and let him who is holy become even holier’ (v. 11)”.