There was once a philosopher named Dr. Eustace Plumbly, who lived in a narrow townhouse in a narrow city and suffered from the narrow conviction — common to philosophers — that nothing in him was really his unless he had made it himself, from scratch, with no outside help, while being observed by three impartial witnesses and a committee.
One evening at dinner, Dr. Plumbly looked down at his plate, which held a perfectly browned pork chop and a heap of mashed potatoes, and he had an unsettling thought.
Am I, he asked himself, really hungry?
The thought had occurred to him because he had been reading Hume, which was an unwise thing to do before a pork chop. And the thought, once it had occurred, would not go away. How could he be sure his hunger was his hunger? What if it was merely the hunger of his stomach — an organ, after all, which he had not designed, had not approved, and could not meaningfully be said to have consented to?
Dr. Plumbly set down his fork. He made a solemn vow.
I shall not eat another bite, he declared to the empty dining room, until I have produced a hunger that is genuinely, autonomously, indisputably mine.
The First Evening
Dr. Plumbly sat at his dining table and waited for an authentic hunger to manifest itself.
At first this was not difficult. He was a man of some willpower. He pushed the pork chop to one side, folded his hands, and waited. The grandfather clock ticked. The pork chop cooled. The potatoes developed the small, sad crust that mashed potatoes develop when they are ignored.
At 8:17 p.m., Dr. Plumbly noticed a small, burbling sensation in his midsection. Aha, he thought — hunger! He was about to reach for the fork when a terrible doubt assailed him. Is this hunger really mine, or is it merely the hunger my stomach has generated on its own initiative, entirely without consulting me?
He sat back, crestfallen. That one didn't count. That was a phantom hunger — a feeling generated by physical processes he had not authorized. He would need to produce a hunger from his will, and his will alone.
He closed his eyes and concentrated. Hunger, he commanded his soul, arise. Nothing arose. He tried again. Hunger, from pure principle, come forth!
His stomach, entirely unimpressed by his principle, rumbled louder.
Dr. Plumbly became very frustrated with his stomach.
The Third Day
By the third day, Dr. Plumbly had developed a theory. His problem, he decided, was that he had been born into a body that came pre-equipped with appetites. These appetites were, technically speaking, the manufacturer's defaults. To locate a truly autonomous hunger, he would have to dig beneath them — past the body's clamoring, past his upbringing's conditioning, past every inherited impulse — and find the small, pure spark of hunger that was his and his alone.
He dug.
He dug for four hours.
Unfortunately, every hunger he discovered beneath every other hunger turned out to have been given to him by somebody or something — his mother, his grandmother, his schoolteacher, a commercial for a pudding he had seen in 1974, the peculiar way light fell on a bakery window when he was eleven. Everywhere he dug, he struck inheritance. There was no floor. The bakery window led down to the pudding commercial, which led down to his grandmother's kitchen, which led down to his infant craving for milk, which led down to the DNA he had not drafted, which led down to ancestors he had never met. Every single hunger came from somewhere he had not put it.
Dr. Plumbly looked up from his digging, profoundly annoyed, and decided the whole project would be easier if he just tried harder.
The Committee
By the fifth day, Dr. Plumbly had become convinced that his problem was insufficient procedural rigor. So he called a committee.
The committee consisted of himself, a second version of himself pretending to be a tenured colleague, and his cat Nigel. They convened at the dining table — still set with the original pork chop, now mostly a memory — and worked out a protocol.
Step one: Dr. Plumbly would propose a hunger.
Step two: The committee would examine the hunger for traces of external origin.
Step three: If no external origin could be established, the hunger would be adopted as autonomous and Dr. Plumbly would be permitted to eat.
Step one went splendidly. Dr. Plumbly produced a dazzling array of hungers. He was hungry for salmon. He was hungry for cake. He was hungry for something warm. He was hungry, in a sudden burst of unexpected pathos, for his mother's lentil soup, which he had not tasted in forty years.
Step two was a disaster. Every hunger failed inspection. The salmon was traceable to a documentary. The cake was his sixth birthday. The warm thing was Februaries in general. The lentil soup was, of course, his mother.
The colleague-version of Dr. Plumbly banged the table and declared all the hungers inadmissible. Nigel, who was the most reasonable member of the committee, licked a paw and walked away.
The Visitor
On the seventh day, Dr. Plumbly's neighbor, a kind older woman named Mrs. Halprin, knocked on the door. She had brought him a bowl of stew.
Dr. Plumbly, who had by this point become alarmingly gaunt, opened the door and explained his situation. Mrs. Halprin listened patiently. Mrs. Halprin was not a philosopher. She was a retired bus driver.
She said: Eustace, dear, you didn't make your own stomach, did you?
No, said Dr. Plumbly, obviously not.
And you didn't decide to need calories?
No.
And you didn't pick the foods you grew up liking?
No.
Then where, said Mrs. Halprin, did you expect to find a hunger that you made yourself?
Dr. Plumbly did not have an answer. He had never considered the question in quite that form. He had assumed, in the vague way philosophers assume things, that somewhere in him there was a private workshop where he manufactured his own appetites, and that if he just held still enough he could catch himself in the act.
But Mrs. Halprin had asked a question he could not answer.
He looked at the stew. His stomach, which had gone silent on day four out of spite, woke up and roared.
Dr. Plumbly ate the stew.
What the Stew Meant
If you would like a moral, here is the moral.
Every desire you have ever had was given to you. Every hunger — for food, for love, for meaning, for praise, for safety, for significance, for God, for more of yourself — arrived in you from outside the little country of yourself. You did not draft your appetites. You do not write your wants. There is no little workshop inside you where you manufacture, from scratch, the things that move you.
This is the joke that is also the whole point.
Dr. Plumbly sat at that table for seven days insisting that his hunger had to come from himself before he could trust it. And the whole time, the pork chop was waiting — made by someone else, paid for by wages earned from work that educated him using knowledge he did not invent, in a body he did not construct, with a hunger placed in him by a God he did not consult. He could have eaten at any time. All he had to do was stop demanding that the hunger be something he had produced alone.
You do exactly this with God. Every time you ask but how do I know my faith is mine, how do I know I'm really saved, how do I know I came to Him and wasn't pushed — you are Dr. Plumbly. You are sitting at the table insisting that the hunger must be self-generated before you can trust it. And the whole time, the hunger itself is the gift. The wanting is the proof.
If you are hungry for Him, someone made you hungry. It was not you. It is never you. It has always, from before the foundation of the world, been Him drawing you, not dragging you — and the drawing feels, from the inside, exactly like my hunger. Because it is. Because all hunger is given. And the One who gave this hunger is not going to let you starve at the table once He has brought you to it.
The Catch
If you, reading this, are tired — if the Plumbly in you is slumping against the dining-room wall after years of digging for an autonomous hunger you are never going to find — then consider, for a moment, that the tiredness is the mercy. The point is that you were never going to make yourself want God on your own. The point is that you don't have to.
Eat the stew.
The God who made your stomach is the God who made your soul. The God who made your soul is the God who placed a hunger in it that nothing on earth can satisfy. He placed the hunger there before you were broken enough to need it, and the reason you recognize the smell of grace when it drifts in under the door is that He has been cooking for you since before you were born.
You do not need to authorize your own appetite for Him. You cannot. Stop demanding the committee. Stop cross-examining your own heart to verify its paperwork. You were rescued without a say in it — and that is not an insult, it is a relief.
The table is set. The Father is in the kitchen. The smell is real. You are held without having asked to be.
Nigel, for what it's worth, has been telling you this all along.
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