Infertility and the Blessedness of Hunger

I have always found Jesus’ words about hunger and poverty difficult to understand. I remember reading the Beatitudes as a child and coming across “blessed are they who hunger” and thinking it unfair. It seemed like God was arbitrarily blessing those who happened to be poor, something which they had little control over. Even as an adult, after more prayer and formation, I still struggled with the similar words of the Magnificat: “He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty.” It is easy to understand why God would be on the side of the poor and come to their aid, but why does it have to be at the expense of the rich?

An experience of profound hunger in my own life helped me to better understand these words of our Lord. My husband and I were childless for five years, during which time our hearts ached for a baby and grieved at the seemingly fruitless nature of our love. During these years, I had plenty of time to deal with my hunger and grief in all the ways that people do: I cried, I tried to think of “solutions,” I told myself things weren’t that bad and that others had it worse, I distracted myself with noise and small pleasures, I vented to friends, I tried not to think about it, I blamed myself, I blamed others, etc.

Sometimes, however, by the grace of God, I simply allowed myself to hunger. I knelt before the Lord in the Eucharist and let myself fully experience and acknowledge the suffering that came along with infertility. I didn’t try to fix it or tell myself that it really wasn’t that bad. I didn’t quickly turn on a podcast, make a cup of coffee, or call a friend to distract myself from the pain.

I simply sat in front of the Lord, embracing reality and living fully in the present. I allowed my heart to break. I offered up my broken heart and hunger for a child to the Lord—not out of any sense of pious duty but because time had stripped away all the other ways I was accustomed to dealing with my pain; there was simply nothing left to do. These were moments of profound communion with the Lord.

The reality of life is that it is a vale of tears, and we all have a hunger which we cannot satisfy. A central tenet of Christianity is that there is something wrong with this world and things are not as they should be. There is sin, death, and suffering. Our hearts pull us in a million directions that we don’t want to go. We desperately seek happiness only to find that it evades us. Things are out of order.

Hunger, therefore, is blessed because it has the potential to put us into greater contact with this reality. It is not that God arbitrarily decides to bless some people and not others; it is that, for some, their state of hunger or poverty gives them the opportunity to see and experience the actual state of things that is otherwise obscured in our postlapsarian world. The rich, the full, the fortunate are at a disadvantage. They can create their own world, a world in which they are self-sufficient, in control, and so distracted by pleasures and luxury (be they licit or illicit) that they do not have to face the brokenness present in every human soul.

This is particularly easy to do in our modern world because technology has allowed us to be out of touch with reality. We don’t experience the suffering inherent to existence like previous generations did. If we are hungry, we have whatever we want to eat; if we are hot, we turn on the AC; if we are sick, we take some Tylenol; if we are bored or sad, we scroll through social media. We don’t have to face our own hunger, which means we don’t have the opportunity to let God satisfy it.

In Mary’s Magnificat, she says that the Lord has filled the hungry with good things. So often we want these good things to be earthly and to come on our terms. But God has promised us good things—not that we will get what we want. In our particular cross of infertility, in one sense He has filled us with good things: we are parents via adoption to three beautiful children for whom we are so grateful; but in another sense, He hasn’t: we are still infertile and have not conceived a child.

When we first learned that we would likely be infertile, I remember sharing it with a friend and crying together. I could tell that it was painful to her that we were going through this suffering, so I told her that I had hope. She smiled and said she was glad, and at that moment I realized we meant two entirely different things by hope. She thought I meant that God caring for me would mean that I would get pregnant someday. By hope, I meant that I knew that God would bring good out of this cross, come what may.

Then and now, hope means that I know that this cross has been an opportunity for union with Him and has brought about good in my soul. It means that if, by God’s grace, I get to Heaven one day, I know I will see the ways that God used me as a spiritual mother during those years of childlessness and that we will see the goodness of His plan that we can now only glimpse.

Prior to infertility, I saw myself as the chief architect of my life. I was going to have as many children as I thought best, have the career that I thought would be most fulfilling, and even serve God how I decided He wanted to be served. Through infertility, God revealed to me my true state of poverty. In reality, I was never in control of my life and absolutely everything is a gift from the Lord.

The rich have failed to recognize the true state of things: their complete poverty before God. They have filled their poverty with something else. Their hands are closed to what God wants to give them.

God invites us to allow ourselves to hunger so that He can fill us with good things. They are not always pleasant things, and they are not always the things we want; but if we trust Him, they are good. And in the words of St. Thérèse, “everything is grace.” Even our sufferings, weaknesses, and difficult situations are opportunities for union with Him, which is the ultimate good.