Sometimes the title of a book just sticks in your head—even if you do not remember the exact contents of the book.  For me, one of those texts was called “Prayer is a Hunger.” I love the idea of that title, and I have some appreciation of what it can and does mean for me.  The readings of this past Sunday brought this text to mind.

We all know what hunger is, at least on some level.  Some of us may even have experienced extraordinary and severe hunger at some point in our lives.  I have never known that deprivation, but that gnawing, empty feeling when I really want something is possible to imagine.  It flows from the sense that something is missing.  We usually speak of hunger in regard to food, and we might extend that meaning to air and warmth.  But we can also conceive of it in relation to a feeling, an object, a value.  We can hunger for justice; we can hunger for love; we can hunger for relief from an affliction.  We experience that kind of aching need and can aptly describe it as a hunger which touches upon something basic, something which we really want and need.

What about describing prayer as a hunger?  Does that make any sense to you?  It suggests that at our very core we need a relationship with God, that we need to talk with God and listen as God speaks to us.  And when we do not have this fullness, we feel the lack.  This hunger can only be satisfied by spiritual nourishment.  Just as we hunger for air and shelter and food, so we hunger for God.  It seems proper to speak in those terms.

The first reading last Sunday spoke about the early Christian community in the Acts of the Apostles.  After Jesus ascends to the Father, the community begins a vigil as they await the coming of the Holy Spirit.  These First Christians gather to pray.  The words are clear:

All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, together with some women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers. (Acts 1:14)

What a wonderful image!  These earliest Christians gathering with Mary to pray.  Christ has literally just departed, and they seek to draw close to him in prayer.  Prayer is not the last resort for this community which needs to get busy, but the first one.  It is not because the community cannot think of anything else to do, but that they cannot think of anything more important to do.  We can imagine them hungering to pray.

In the Gospel, we find Jesus at prayer.  He is speaking to the Father in the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel, and during this prayer, he says specifically, “I pray for them,” that is, the disciples who have been following him.  Later in this passage he will say that he prays not only for them but for all who believe through their preaching.  Jesus wanted to bring his friends and their friends before the Father.  How many times have people asked you to pray for them?  It can happen often enough.  Jesus prays for his disciples. I wonder how many times they asked him to do that.  And Jesus prays for us.  For Jesus, prayer was not a last resort or an obligation; it was the air that he breathed.  He hungered for the Father throughout his whole ministry, and he reached out for the divine nourishment in prayer.  I am confident that he prayed all the time and in all circumstances.  He does it so well, and was so uplifted by the experience, that the disciples ask him to teach them how.  They must have felt a little hungry, and Jesus knew how to fill that emptiness.

Sunday’s readings can lead us to think about prayer and, perhaps, our hunger to pray.  We can feel that desire, and we can sense our need to do so as a community.  Prayer means that God is part of our conversation, part of our planning, part of our decision and future.  We probably have a lot of things to say to God, but how hungry are we?