In this last year I became aware of the post Harry Potter
reading rage among middle school aged children, the Hunger Games. The book was brought to my attention by a
middle school client, who told me the entire 8th grade class was
reading the story. I admit to not having
read the book or having seen the movie, but the theme of the Hunger Games
intrigues me. It seems to be almost a
metaphor for our times.
The story takes place in a North America
following the destruction of the countries comprising North America .
In the story each year one boy and girl from each of the 12 district of Panem
are selected to participate in the hunger games. What is interesting to the entire plot of the
book is that this is a no holds barred competition to live, to eat, to make it
in a world gone terribly wrong. My teen
clients readily admit that in this book teens kill teens to survive.
This is why I think the title Hunger Games is a metaphor for
our society today. There seems to be so
much more anxiety over our future as a country then there was before. And the theme of hunger intrigues me since it
seems we have real hungers facing all of us.
To name a few:
1.
Hunger for what it takes to become fully human. John
Powell, a popular author and speaker cites four desires of being human: Freedom,
peace, happiness, love. All of us hunger to some degree for the deep longing to
fulfill our lives and for the conditions and resources to meet these needs.
2.
Hunger for sustenance, real hunger. According to the U.N. one in seven in the
world will go to bed hungry. That is
nearly 1 billion people. There are
more people hungry in our world than the combined populations of the US ,
Canada and the
countries comprising the European Union.
In a country dealing with an epidemic of obesity one in four children
worldwide are underweight due to hunger. Go to
http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
for more information.
3.
Hunger for solving the huge problems we face, including
feeding the more than 6 billion humans worldwide. And it seems that the more problems we face
the more polarized we all become. It
seems that one group is pitted against the next in a competitive struggle to
gain influence and power. Competition
seems to have replaced cooperation. The
right fights the left, and so it goes.
4.
Hunger for God, a spiritual hunger. St. Augustine
says, “Our hearts are restless Lord until they rest in you.” Karl Jung said
that after age 40 most problems people face are spiritual in nature. Facing
limits, vulnerability, the death of family and friends forces a person to try
to pierce the veil of limits and cry out for transcendence only God can
fulfill.
Of the four hungers I cited above only the fourth, the
hunger for God, doesn’t involve competition.
This is because, as our major religious traditions tell us, God’s love
is not limited, but abundant. It is an
expanding and infinite resource. When we
say “God is love” we also call ourselves to embrace a cooperative, not
competitive stance towards the world and the relationships which define us.
When I work with couples I often notice spouses compete with
each other to get their intimacy needs met. Competition creates winners and losers, which
is not good for the relationship. When
it comes to scarcity of resources and meeting needs, cooperation, not competition
is the most important thing for a couple, and I spend most of my time trying to
get a couple to become more cooperative and less competitive in the meeting of
their needs.
This brings me back to the theme of hunger and the thought
that cooperation, not competition, is more God-like. Of course, in order to make resources more
abundant I might have to sacrifice some of the resources I have. I might have to become more cooperative in
allowing someone to have the resource of being listened to, attended to,
educated, housed, fed. But it seems like
a good trade off, becoming more cooperative rather than competitive. Or perhaps
you would like to consider the alternative dystopian view of the Hunger Games,
where the more resourced, better armed, more clever people eliminate the weak
and less skilled.
“Our hearts are restless Lord, until they rest in you.” For what are you hungry, and who will fill
that need?
