What Are You Hungry For?

We’re rounding the home-stretch and sliding into Holy Week 2026. My daughter will, God willing, be baptized this Saturday during Easter Vigil.

For my part, I feel like I am crawling, dragging myself to Easter. No, that’s not right. I am not dragging myself because I don’t even have the energy to crawl. I’m being pulled along by a thin trickle of Spirit, like a blood clot being pushed through an artery in the Body of Christ or a leaf carried along the thin trickle that is what’s left of the Colorado River. I am empty, spent, thirty, hungry. Dry.

Midi asked for some more learning leading up to Easter Vigil so I sent her some videos on the meaning of Holy Week. A short video and then a deeper dive by Father Chris Alar. We’re driving down to Lafayette for the Chrism Mass tomorrow and I wanted to find something we can listen to on repentance. I revisited Sister Josephine Garrett’s talk from The Eucharistic Congress.

I was there to watch this amazing witness live but what really hit me upon rewatching it was hunger. What am I hungry for? I already know I’m not patient. So what do I turn toward to ease that hunger instead of waiting on Jesus?

I’m Hungry For…

Jesus, all of Him. I’m hungry to just sit at His feat and look at nothing else but Him.

I’m hungry for quiet and prayer. I’m hungry for Communion: in Him and with all of my brothers and sisters. I’m hungry for the day when we can just love and understand each other without all of the garbage and drama and pride that gets in the way.

I’m hungry for communication and just the joy of learning more about Him. In the St. Teresa of Avila retreat, the retreat leader said that since we can see the face of Jesus in every person we can gain a more complete view of Jesus by seeing how He acts in the lives of others. By walking with them and sharing our journeys and hearing about theirs, we can See Him more clearly.

I’m hungry for spiritual direction and companionship.

But most of all, I’m hungry for Jesus’ fire to clear out anything that doesn’t bring me closer to Him, though I’m also scared of getting burned in the process.

But I’m Impatient and Self Sufficient

So I want to feed myself and so I turn to things that don’t fill this hunger or kind of approximate it. Like when you’re hungry for chocolate cake but you’re on a diet so you drink skim chocolate milk instead. It just makes you want the real thing even more.

How We Feed Ourselves

I once read that people who are mean to live a creative life often end up in supporting fields for their artist’s passion. For example, people who are meant to write take jobs as editors and spend their time cleaning up the writing of others, never getting around to writing anything of their own.

So I read and learn, but don’t pray. Or I pray but don’t read and learn.

Or more to the point, I work for the church and fill my life with a thousand ministerial tasks that there is no time for prayer, penance, study, teaching, or writing.

Recognizing this, I’m being more intentional about what I say yes to and what activities I attend at Church and beyond. I’m spending time in prayer to ask the Holy Spirit, “What do you want me to do today, given my vocation as a wife and mother? Where do you want me to spend the time You have so graciously given me?“

Lately, the directive has been to spend time with my husband. To work in our garden and lift some burdens off his very tired shoulders.

And when I do this, it feels like prayer and I feel some fullness bloom inside.

So in deference to what I’m hungry for, which is to walk with you, Dear Reader, I’m asking honestly and openly…

What are you hungry for?