From Spiritual Hunger to Obesity Epidemic

Spiritual Sunday

My wife Julia has been telling me about a book that she’s reading, Geneen Roth’s Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything. The thesis of the book seems to be that overeating, like other compulsions and obsessions, is a means of escaping a spiritual emptiness. Or to put it another way, some people fill up that emptiness with food, others fill it up with work or meaningless activities.

I’m interested in the way that Roth uses literature to help her express her ideas. For instance, she turns to a line from the James Joyce story “A Painful Case” in Dubliners to capture the sense of alienation people feel: “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” Mr. Duffy is a colorless bank cashier who, when tenderness and love finally do enter his life, turns his back on them. According to Roth, the sentence she cites

perfectly expresses the mass twenty-first-century evacuation from our bodies. We think of ourselves as walking heads with bothersome, unattractive appendages attached.

To counteract spiritual emptiness, she looks for guidance to a Mary Oliver poem and a Nikos Kazantzakis novel:

In her poem “When Death Comes, Mary Oliver writes: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life/I was a bride married to amazement.”

Me too. I want a life of amazement. I want to show up for what Zorba the Greek called “the whole catastrophe.” And after living through decades of being married to obsession and self-constructed suffering, I have found that being married to amazement means showing up in the only place from which to experience it: here, now, in this very moment.”

Roth says that we are to live in the body we have and in the life where we reside. Elsewhere in the book she quotes a Buddhist monk saying that hell is wanting to be somewhere other than where we actually are.

To my mind, the quotation that Roth uses to best effect is from the novel The English Patient:

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water. There is a plant [in the desert] whose heart, if one cuts it out, is replaced with a fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid the amount of a missing heart.

Compulsive eating, Roth goes on to say,

is an attempt to avoid the absence (of love, comfort, knowing what to do) when we find ourselves in the desert of a particular moment, feeling, situation. In the process of resisting the emptiness, in the act of turning away from our feelings, of trying and trying again to lose the same twenty, fifty, eighty pounds, we ignore what could utterly transform us. But when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we evoke that in us that is not a story, not caught in the past, not some old image of ourselves. We evoke divinity itself. And in doing so, we can hold emptiness, old hurts, fear in our cupped hands and behold our missing hearts.

As I was talking about these passages with Julia, she recalled a weird and disturbing incident that occurs in the Book of Numbers from The Torah (and Old Testament). The Hebrews, hungry in the desert, are calling out for food and complaining about having left Egypt, whereupon God tells Moses that he will send food. Only that’s the bad news:

Ye shall not eat one day, nor two days, nor five days, neither ten days, nor twenty days; But even a whole month, until it come out at your nostrils, and it be loathsome unto you: because that ye have despised the LORD which is among you, and have wept before him, saying, Why came we forth out of Egypt? (Numbers 11:19-20)

The windfall that then shows up proves toxic:

And there went forth a wind from the LORD, and brought quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp, as it were a day’s journey on this side, and as it were a day’s journey on the other side, round about the camp, and as it were two cubits high upon the face of the earth. And the people stood up all that day, and all that night, and all the next day, and they gathered the quails: he that gathered least gathered ten homers: and they spread them all abroad for themselves round about the camp. And while the flesh was yet between their teeth, ere it was chewed, the wrath of the LORD was kindled against the people, and the LORD smote the people with a very great plague. (Numbers 11:31-33)

Interpreting the passage through the lens of Women Food and God, the people are not willing to sit with their emptiness and get in touch with God. Rather, in the spirit of modern consumer society, they feel driven to gorge themselves.

Mother Theresa once said that she had never seen hunger, a spiritual hunger, like that she encountered in the United States. In talking about this, she held up, as a contrast, the story of a starving man in Calcutta who shared half a banana with a fellow sufferer.

America may be outrageously wealthy, yet our airwaves and internet are filled with incessant complaint and we are experiencing what has been called an “epidemic of obsesity.” After marshaling literary passages to articulate the condition, Roth then uses them to point the way to the cure: Live in harmony with your body.  Open your heart and allow herbal goodness to flow in.  Become a bride married to amazement.