A Hunger

We all get hungry physically for food, or at least I do.  If I don't eat at certain intervals, I get hungry.  I think of food.  I want food.  I eat my main meal in the middle of the day.  At night I have to go to bed by a certain time depending on how little I ate that evening.  If I wait too long to go to bed and ate too little for supper I am hungry when I go to bed.  I get up to eat.  I have pretty much figured this out.  But we have spiritual hungers too.  Unlike my stomach, my soul does not complain so much initially.  The result is that I can go a whole day and not even pray!  Yikes.  Not good, especially for a priest.  I will say, "Later," but later never comes.  I have to discipline myself for prayer times to satisfy the hunger of my soul.  Otherwise, after a day, my soul will complain in the form of moods, irritability, and just general unpleasantness such as whining and crankiness.  Now the hunger of my soul is for silence and stillness.  It is that need for us all I think.  The will has a hunger too, but when the will directs prayer I tend to ask for things with lots of words.  Mass is supposed to have some of both, but my experience is that in a parish the silence gets short shift.  Each day I try to make time for silence and stillness whether I think I "need" it or not.  "Be still and know that I am God." God said that...more than once.