Bruce Springsteen’s first big hit, Hungry Heart, has been running through my mind lately. For those of you who are not over 50, it was released in 1980 on his album, The River. The lyrics deal with making some bad choices, continuing to make bad choices, and always ending up with a hungry heart. The music is pretty upbeat, contrasting with the lyrics. You can listen to it here.
Perhaps the reason the song keeps popping up is that I am also reading Geneen Roth’s Feeding the Hungry Heart. It came out in 1982, and I do not doubt she danced around her den singing Springsteen a couple of years before.
The title for the song (and maybe the book) come from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses. There is this wonderful line “For always roaming with a hungry heart” that speaks to never being filled.
The book is about compulsive eating. Roth writes of our need to fill something that cannot be filled otherwise. Her opening chapter starts with these words- “You can never get enough of what you really don’t want.”
She mostly deals with people who are binge eaters. A gallon of ice cream covered with whipped cream, walnuts, and cherries at one sitting. Several packs of Oreos at once. A dozen or two donuts. And the associated guilt and shame that usually follows. She says that we are trying hard to love ourselves, and we don’t know how. There is aching inside that, while it cannot be filled with food, it can be silenced for a while. But until the hungry heart is satisfied, the hungry stomach never will be.
St. Augustine wrote in the fourth century, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Referring to God. Evangelists in the 1960s and 70s, the age of psychological fulfillment, would say that our hearts had a God-shaped hole that nothing else could fill.
But what about those who do know Christ? Have asked him to come into their lives, forgive their sin, lead them to new life? Those who seek to follow him every day, to be his body in the world today?
I ask this question because I am a follower of Jesus, yet I have a hungry heart. Both in the Springsteen and Roth modes. While I have made some bad choices in the past, hurt myself and others, I am trying to not continue down those paths. And, by the grace of God and with the support of good friends and spouse, I am stumbling towards the goal.
I do not binge eat like the clients in Roth’s book, at least not anymore. But I eat. A lot. That is, if I am sitting down and there is food, it is about to be eaten. I’m not hungry. But put me in front of a tv, in a movie theatre, or just sitting on the back porch pondering the goodness of life, and there will be calories consumed.
During this season of Lent, I have been taking time each day to do some deeper self- examination. This is one I have been looking at (and singing about) for the last week. What am I trying to fill? And why don’t I stop when I realize it will never be filled? At least not by food.
There’s a great scene in the movie High Fidelity. John Cusack, who runs a record store, keeps sabotaging relationships with one woman to move on to the next. He stops for one second and yells “Why do I keep doing this?!!!”
Springsteen says
“Everybody needs a place to rest
Everybody wants to have a home
Don’t make no difference what nobody says
Ain’t nobody like to be alone.”
And maybe that’s what I need to remember. I am not alone.
O God, feed my hungry heart.
Michael Henderson 