Christianity and the experience of need

This paper is a meditation on experiences over the past few years which have brought me to look at Christianity as a living truth. This is in contrast to how I saw it in the past, as a set of truth claims which had little or no relation to how I lived day to day. More specifically, viewing Christianity as a set of metaphysical claims had little effect on transforming me from a person unaware of my need for grace to one who knows I lack the most important thing in life. It is in the light of this transformation that this paper is written, revolving around the account of Jesus being called into the desert by the Holy Spirit and what I refer to as 'the experience of need' .

The experience of 'felt need' is central in stories of individuals who are going through spiritual transformations. By 'felt need' I mean simply what the term connotes: the sensation of a lack; of a need for something. This sensation can be for some physical, spiritual or psychological object. I can need food or warmth, for example, but I can also need forgiveness and mercy. Above all, I need acceptance. The fact this experience plays a central role in many Biblical texts suggests it is essential to a spiritual life.

Perhaps the best known example in the Bible where 'felt need' shows up is in the account of Jesus being called into the desert by the Holy Spirit. The image of a desert underscores the reality of emptiness; of lack. Central to the spiritual significance of Jesus' response to his time in the desert is this lack. When I let my mind rest on this lack and emptiness I am brought to recall my own experience of emptiness. I recall finding that when I try to get my own needs met, I often find that I am unable to "fill" them by my power alone. The inability to fill my need by my own power has become thematic for my life and has been significant in coming to a more experiential understanding of Christianity.

As I have allowed myself to experience emptiness over the last few years, I have been brought to a place which is its flip side: this empty space within has become a prerequisite; a condition of what I am looking for. When I reflect on the image of Jesus in the desert and through that image move into and remain in my own empty space, resisting the urge to "fill" it with people, places or things, I remind myself that Jesus remained there for "40 days and 40 nights." Being told by the Gospel writers that Jesus remains in the desert for "40 days and 40 nights" suggests that I, too, ought to stay with the emptiness; in fact, I ought to embrace it. There has come to be for me a close connection, then, between remaining in this empty "space" and, paradoxically, getting my need filled in a way which I had never before imagined and which truly satisfies.

By meditating on the account of Jesus' experience of need in the desert and applying insights gained therefrom to my own life, a biblical account which I had heretofore looked at as more or less irrelevant suddenly offers to me a simple but profound guide to living in a wholly new way. When I imaginatively identify with Jesus' experience, I come to sense that I too am being called to embrace emptiness as a way to deepen my life spiritually. To do this I need to confront my pride and shame, both of which get in the way of my identification with Jesus' desert experience. My shame compels me to avoid becoming aware of my own need, while my pride tells me I must strive with all my effort to make myself independent even when doing so does not get me what I truly need and want.

We are told that Jesus is called into the desert by the Holy Spirit "in order to be tempted". We are also told that Jesus is "sinless." Here I am interested in the question: What counts as Jesus' being sinless? The fact that we are told that Jesus is called into the desert "in order to be tempted" suggests that there is a close connection between Jesus' being sinless and the way he responds to his own need.1

While most of us are aware of the concept of temptation and need, I wonder how many of us have considered relating Jesus' experience in the desert to our own life? Specifically, have we attempted to relate Jesus' experience of need to our own? How might Jesus' response to his experience of need be a "map" which shows us how to respond to our own need and desire in a more effective way? More generally, how can reflection on Jesus' desert experience help us think of temptation and sin in a way that reveals to us something about our deepest nature? While considering the core ideas of the Gospel in this light may seem impious at first glance, I believe it is urgent for us today to seek to grasp how the Gospel writers experienced the events they wrote about and to consider how these insights might point us towards a truer way of living. As it is today in much of the West, the central texts of Christianity are looked at as revealing historical "information" which have no relation to our lives today, as metaphysical claims which may be beautiful but not really transformational. At other times they are viewed as conveying truth in literal fashion.

In contrast to thinking about Gospel accounts in a manner which often renders them irrelevant to our being and becoming; to how we live, I will offer here a practical way of thinking about temptation and sin, one which is grounded in the experience of felt need and our response to it. We can define sin experientially as follows: Sin occurs when I get my needs met "in the wrong way". "The wrong way" is constituted in any action or attitude which increases the 'distance' between the self I live out of each day, on the one hand, and my true self, God and other people in my life, on the other.2 Temptation, then, occurs when I encounter a desire to fill a need in a way that increases the distance between myself and that which is most truthful and good in my life.

Jesus' being sinless can at this point be understood as a refusal to respond to his own experience of need in the wrong way, e.g. a way which increases his distance from his true self, God and those around him. Jesus did not, however, merely avoid doing wrong in his response to his temptation. He responds in a way that he gets what he truly needs. To say that Jesus is "sinless" experientially means, then, not only that he did not do wrong, but that he responded to his experience of need "in the right way." In the process he lived as a guide for us to "fill" our need in a radically new way, a way which offers to get us what we truly need. This way is paradoxical to its core. 3

Let us now apply the desert context in which Jesus experiences temptation to our lives. In that empty inner place which is symbolized by the image of a desert I am offered the opportunity, which I can accept or reject, to gain clarity about the core issues in my life. This increased clarity becomes possible when I move into and remain in my own inner emptiness. I then discipline myself to avoid "filling" that emptiness with all the distractions which are available to me, including relationships and things. All those ways of relating to people and things in the world which surround me and which I "use" to fill my inner need constitute possible temptations.

Temptations are precisely those phenomena I experience which appear to point me towards what I truly want and need when in fact they will always fail to do so. Temptations entail the illusion that something will fill my need when the reality is that if I act on it I will experience more need. Paradoxically, one of the effects of responding to the experience of need in the wrong way, i.e. sinfully, is to make me experience more need, not less. Conversely, a sign that I am responding to the experience of need in the right way is that I will feel more at peace with myself, God and others. The experience of need does not necessarily disappear, but it transforms into a different kind of need. The discussion at this point suggests that we have, then, two kinds of need, what we might think of as 'false need' and 'true need'. Responding in the right way to a desert experience, or need, requires among other things that I distinguish the two.

The distinction between two kinds of need evokes the difference between want and need. Generally speaking, when I confuse wants with needs, I will experience more need primarily because the object I focus on cannot ultimately satisfy. Generally, sense objects of desire are for the most part unable to get us what we truly need, and when we over stress some sense object of desire, we experience an increase in subjective need for it. I refer to this kind of need as false need. To say that we must distinguish 'false need' from 'true need' is another way of saying that we must avoid assuming that what we want is identical to what we need. We must, in other words, keep before our heart and mind what we truly need. In doing this we may experience an intuition of the mystery of God, insofar as making this distinction leads us to the paradox of getting what we truly want.

In Platonic language, which contributes to our distinction between true and false objects of desire and need, I must distinguish the mere feeling or sensation that something or some act is good for me from its really being so. For us as modern individuals, this is not so easy to do, owing to the dominance of soft relativism and strong subjectivism in our culture today. It is not my purpose here to discuss how our society surrounds us with false desires. Rather, I want to suggest that precisely because our highly commercial culture offers to fill any and all feelings of emptiness with this or that object, we have an ongoing opportunity to respond - like Jesus in the desert - in such a way that will continually bring us closer to our true self, God and others. Precisely because living in our society brings us to experience a degree and kind of temptation we may have never considered as such, we have an opportunity to respond to our own emptiness in way that truly satisfies. We can respond to temptation as it shows up in our society "in the right way". While many of us give lip service to the notion that our society is materialistic, I want to propose something radical yet simple: By becoming aware that our true need is not being filled by all the objects our highly commericalized culture offers us, and then responding to that need in a new way, disciplining ourselves not to conflate wants with true needs, the emptiness we experience when we feel "less than" because we don't have or experience what we imagine others to have or experience can come to be a source of spiritual enrichment rather than impoverishment. The way we live each day will impoverish rather than enrich us to the extent that we continue to react to subjective need in the way we "have always done so", believing that the pursuit of objects of desire will get our deep needs and desires met. Owing largely to our society's underlying definition of well being and happiness, we tend to be resistant to allowing ourselves to experience felt need long enough to remain in an "empty space" in which we can gain needed insights.

To respond in the right way to the temptations our modern society presents us with requires that we first see that the objects of desire which surround us; our identification of ourselves with our job as well as wealth and social position gained therewith, are not identical with what we ultimately need and desire. To see this clearly would require many of us in our society to give up an important part of our self-identity. But if we experience this as an essential part of our selves, and if the central means by which we seek our own salvation is by dying to self, then it follows that if we are to sincerely seek the good and the true, we must take seriously the possibility that we are not to tightly hold onto our socially formed identity but rather to "let go" of it. I believe that "letting go" of all the various objects we have become accustomed to subjectively experiencing as "the most important things" constitutes the central task for us as modern Chrisitians. If the Gospel writers have gained insight into a truth of human existence, it seems that we too are called to leave our illusion behind that we can or should fill our deep need; our deepest longings with the objects that surround us. We are to embrace this need, this emptiness. I believe that embracing our deep need is core to what Jesus is calling us to do. But to do so we need first to see that what we thought was filling our need is in fact not doing so. We need to become open to the possibility that we are living in illusion.

Over the course of my life I have discovered that I am disinclined to live in the best way I possibly can. I am resistant to embracing the fact that I am responsible for the spiritual quality of my life and that this responsibility must be accepted day to day.4 In existential language, I deeply fear my contingency; my freedom. I believe we Americans are, perhaps not ironically, most fearful of our contingency. This is another paradox of modern society, for our society constantly preaches freedom as the highest good. If I am right that we are in fact afraid of true freedom, then all the public talk praising freedom might be viewed, with Heidegger, as a way being conceals itself from view in our day. By seeking the truth and gaining insight into the fact that we might be afraid of our radical freedom; our contingency, we can gain courage to hear what we need to hear: the call of Jesus to resist responding to the experience of emptiness in the way our society has habituated us to. We can begin to do this by distinguishing our false desire from true need and then embracing that need.

We in the West have a spiritual responsibility today to seek to gain the needed insights into our spiritually impoverished condition, a condition which arises largely out of our confusion of inflamed subjective desire and true need, and then respond to those insights "in the right way." The form contingency takes for us today and which is both our ultimate freedom and our burden is the responsibility to confront the fact that how we live for the most part does not and can not get us our true needs. If this is an accurate description of our spiritual condition, this would imply that after all, we too are already in a desert experience. Seeking to gain this dual insight - that the "temptations" which surround us do not after all get us what we need and that by becoming aware that we are in need in a totally different way we ever thought we were - is the most profound response we can make to our contingency in our time.

When I allow my mind and heart to rest on the image of Jesus going into the desert and experiencing temptation, I consider how he may have experienced need. As I said above, I am not speaking about what is needed so much as the experience of need itself and our responses to it. What seems to be key in the account of Jesus' life in general and the desert account in particular is how he goes through his experience of felt need as well as how he responds to it. Responding 'in the right way' to both my own false desires and the subjective experience of need, but also to the experience of need in others, is not constituted in what is objectively given or received, but in how I relate to myself and others in the giving and receiving. The way I relate is entailed in the form and not the content of the particular response I take to desire and need in the given circumstance, whether in myself or another.

The notion that I am being called to become fully aware of my reliance on God and others in all areas of my life is particularly relevant for me as American. Because I live in this society I have internalized the belief that self-reliance and independence are among the highest virtues. Stated in terms of an analysis of false desire and true need, I am taught to define my happiness in relation to something which cannot truly satisfy by virtue of the fact that I will tend to ground my self-sufficiency in relationship to external realities. Instead of spending the rest of our lives living in accord with the dominant understanding of happiness, however, we might try practicing remaining with the sensation of discomfort arising out of our coming to awareness that what we thought would get our needs and desires met isn't doing so. Stated in more biblical terms, we might become open to the thought that the meaning of Jesus' desert experience is not consistent with the way most of us live most of the time. I want to suggest that we think of this coming to consciousness not as judgment of our lives but as an opportunity to respond to the form temptation takes for us "in the right way". 5 By allowing ourselves to remain in the empty space we move into when we allow ourselves to become conscious that our way of responding to need for the most part has failed to truly satisfy, I take a first step in allowing myself to experience lack more deeply. I see that I too have been in the desert.

When we come to a fuller consciousness that self-reliance is in fact core to our self-identity and then allow ourselves to question whether this belief is consistent with what I am arguing is a central Christian claim concerning how to truly live, most of us will likely be inclined to walk away from the challenge to look again at a belief we have held for so long in an unthinking way. We will be tempted to think of and respond to our experience of need much like the rich man in response to Jesus' offering him two opposing ways of living. It is as a rich man that this person believes he has already gotten his need met.6 If Christianity is truly counter-cultural, Americans experience this perhaps no where else so strongly as when they juxtapose the notion that they are in need of God and other people alongside the fact that independence and self-reliance are crucial to our self-identity. The two bases of self-understanding are at conflict with one another, and the responsibility for us to confront this reality is yet another form contingency takes for us. To accept that I cannot be self-sufficient in the way I have for the most part believed I am supposed to be is to allow myself to become open to an important insight. When I do see that I am not after all self-sufficient I can then come to see how I do have need in a way I may never have considered.

This double realization, that we may hold two values which are in conflict with one another and that one of them may be false, can lead to a kind of doubt and anxiety that we are unaccustomed too. If we respond to these feelings by simply becoming more willful or trying a new way to fill essentially the same desire we will have for the time being failed to learn the needed insights and will end up spiritually and emotionally frustrated. If, however, we discipline ourselves from merely reacting negatively to this experience and remain with it, I believe it can become a way for us into a desert experience. Our self-questioning can lead us into an "empty space" which we respond to "in the right way", paradoxically, by remaining in it. This empty-space-as-desert-experience, grounded in becoming aware that I am not after all self-sufficient in the way I thought I was and need to be, can be the beginning of a lived faith. This lived faith is constituted in my conscious embrace of the truth that I need deeply and that my need is not of the sort I had for so long assumed it to be. My true need is to relate to my true self, God and others in a particular sort of way. I believe that we can gain insights into this way by considering the life of Jesus in the light of his desert experience and his response to need in both himself and others.

What insights are gained when we meditate on Jesus' 40 days and nights in the desert? As applied in our daily living, what do we gain when we "go through" our own need in the right way, rather than short-circuiting it by "filling" it with the temptations that surround us? As we just saw, responding to the experience of need "in the right way" is more than choosing the right objects to "fill" it with. The account of Jesus' being called into the desert "in order to be tempted" points us towards that moral-spiritual idea which is core to the message of Christianity: The meaning of the desert story is that I am called by God to become fully conscious of and embrace my own insufficiency; my own need. I am called to die to false identities. A right response to the experience of temptation does not come primarily in what I fill my emptiness; my need with, but first of all in an awareness that I have need and then allowing myself to remain in the resulting spacious consciousness. Into this spaciousness might I learn to invite my true self, God and others. In short, in response to the consciousness of my own lack of having it all, I am called to become more conscious of my need for my true self, God and other people.

The message of the account of Jesus' desert experience, then, seems to be that we are supposed to "go through" our need, steadfastedly avoiding attempting to fill it with those things we are told will satisfy our desires. It is precisely this condition of inner emptiness which I believe we are called to embrace. We are called to first "see" our own need; our own "emptiness", and then once seen, avoid attempting to fill that space by our own power alone. This space is holy and when I remain in it, it can enable me to come closer to God, my true self, and others. It is thus that I experience God in my life.

End Notes

1. The understanding of Jesus' holiness I offer here, note, is in contrast to what I believe is a highly Platonized understanding of holiness. The typical view of Jesus is that his special status owes to qualities which are conceived as wholly separate from the way he lived. I question whether this conception is truthful to Jesus as one who lived a peak human life and who as such can offer us a path to true living, a path we can gain insight into only by considering his experiences as portrayed by the Gospel writers. I believe, furthermore, that the Holy Spirit is moving us to think of Jesus in this light at this time in our history.

2. I distinguish 'true self' from 'self' in order to bracket an empiricist understanding of the self dominant in English speaking societies. Assuming that the self is grounded solely in its relation to external reality will mitigate against a true spirituality. This is not the place to go into detail about this philosophical problem, but if English speakers in particular are to live more truly we will have to come to grips with the spiritual 'thinness' of this culturally grounded notion of self which has developed out of the Enlightenment. This is a task to which those who work in the field of ideas can make a real contribution if they choose to do so.

3. Some may feel that such a focus on getting what we truly need is self-centered or egotistical in a way Jesus was not. I believe that there is a tendency in segments of our culture to interpret Jesus as representing a kind of self-denial which has masochistic overtones. James Alison has a wonderful chapter in his book "On Being Liked" titled "Untying Atonement Theory's Knots" on this topic. I believe that the heavy stress in English speaking countries on self-denial as an end in itself owes to a great extent to Jansenism, a formal heresy which remains influential in English-language Catholic culture and which has its roots in Ireland and France. As concerns the notion that Jesus preaches self-denial, he never does or says anything which suggests that we are to be self-denying as an end in itself, but always as a means of getting what we truly need.

6. To the rich ruler Jesus says: "‘Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.' But when he heard this, he became sad, for he was very rich. Jesus looking at him said, "How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Luke 18:22-25