Soul Cravings: An Exploration of the Human Spirit

by Erwin Raphael McManus

A film called 21 Grams, starring Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, and Naomi Watts, has a narrative that revolves around the value of a human life. Its lead-in refers to a phenomenon that happens at the time of our death. They say we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death . . . everyone.” “The weight of a stack of nickels, the weight of a chocolate bar, the weight of a hummingbird.

The question posed is simple yet profound: “How much does life weigh?” The implication, of course, is that what is lost in the twenty one grams is the human spirit, that there is more to us than simply flesh and blood. So let me put my cards on the table: I believe you are more than water and dust. At your core you are a spiritual being of infinite value. To be human is a gift. You are created by God, and you have immeasurable value to him.

Jesus once said that the kingdom of God is within us. Yet most of us don’t even bother to explore the possibility that this might be true. It seems that what he is implying is that we have a better chance of finding God in the universe within us than in the one that surrounds us. And it is on this path that I invite you to walk with me. I invite you to engage in an exploration of the human spirit, to journey deep inside yourself and search out the mystery of the universe that exists within you. This is the question I was asked to face years ago when I found myself desperately struggling to understand myself, trying to measure the weight of this one life. There I was, making my personal contribution to the extensive research being done on the meaning of ink blots. “What do you see?” Even at twelve I knew this was a trick question. He wanted to know what I saw so that he could see inside me. It really is a good question, though. Your re...

Bitterness, for instance, is like a cancer that makes you blind. I had allowed hurt to make my soul toxic. From my end, I was sure that I was just becoming a realist. In fact, I was desensitizing myself. Why risk being hurt more? I didn’t realize I was becoming blind to love. I couldn’t see the people around me who really cared. Their sincere efforts went unnoticed. If you had asked me then, I would have said they weren’t there. I look back now and realize I just couldn’t see them, but they were right ...

Bitterness is the enemy of love because it makes you unforgiving and unwilling to give love unconditionally. It is the enemy of hope because you keep living in the past and become incapable of seeing a better future. It is the enemy of faith because you stop trusting in anyone but yourself . I bring this up because I think many of us become blinded by a bitterness of the soul. If we are not careful, we will lose the ability to see such things as...

It is the story of all of us. I would like to guide you on a soul journey and help you discover that which is already there within you. And you’ll ask more than simply, What do I see? You’ll also ask, What do I hear? What do I feel?What do I find?

I should mention that this is not a book focused on empirical evidence for God. It is about coming to know ourselves. Soul Cravings is a journal of the human story. It is about our story; and if God exists, we should be able to find him there. I don’t know how to prove God to you. I can only hope to guide you to a place where you and God might meet.

Perhaps John Donne said it best: “I am two fools, I know. For loving and for saying so.” There’s probably no subject ever discussed among human beings that is more captivating and more elusive than love. From Aphrodite to Oprah Winfrey, we look to our mavens to guide us through this tumultuous jungle of human emotions. Every generation writes about love. From Pride and Prejudice, the Jane Austen novel, to Pride and Prejudice, the British miniseries, to Pride and Prejudice, the Hollywood movie, to Bridget Jones’s Diary (aka Pride and Prejudice for those that don’t know they like Pride and Prejudice), we never seem able to escape the maddening effects of love. We are driven by love, driven to love, and even driven from love.

HAVE YOU EVER COME FACE-TO-FACE WITH THE VACUUM of love that exists within your soul? Have you ever had an unexplainable sense of loneliness even while you’re standing in the middle of a crowd? At the same time you can be all by yourself and have a wonderful sense of connectedness with the world. You can enjoy being alone, but you can become lost in aloneness. Have you ever wondered whether you are the one person who simply could not be loved or was somehow born unworthy of love? Sometimes we’ll go to unimaginable extremes to earn love, to feel love, to be loved. Without love, every night is a three-dog night.

We are created to know God and and to know love. It is love that moves God toward us and love that pulls us toward him. Follow love and it will guide you to God. Love is the beginning of all things. From the very beginning you were made for love.

It may be hard to accept, but you are the object of God’s love. You were created out of love by him, and though you may not yet realize it, your soul longs to know this love. But it goes way beyond that. You are a creature of love. You are designed to love and be loved. Our search for intimacy explains our need for community, relationship, friendship, and acceptance; it is expressed most deeply in our need for romantic love.

IRONICALLY, SOMETIMES WHEN WE FEEL THERE IS NO PLACE for us in the world, we choose to live a life of isolation and disconnectedness—sort of our way of sticking it to all of humanity before they can get to us. You’ve asked yourself the question over and over again, Is there anyone who really cares? And your conclusion is, No. So you decide to join them. You’re not going to care either. You’re not going to feel any more hurt. Sometimes we take this so far that we decide the only way not to feel pain is to inflict it.

Contact with the real world—it’s not optional; it’s essential. We are created for relationship. We are born for community. For us to be healthy, we must be a part of others. Independence is one thing; isolation is another. The more we live disconnected lives, the more we become indifferent to the well-being of others. The farther we move from community, thecloserwemovetoviolence.

Over the years we’ve come to expect urban violence. If we were honest with ourselves, we would have to acknowledge that many of us have become desensitized to crime and violence in our inner cities and especially among the urban poor, which is probably why what happened in the quiet community of Jefferson County, Colorado, so affected the American psyche. Two teenage boys planned for over a year to ruthlessly massacre as many students and teachers at Columbine High School as possible. If I know nothing else about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, I know that they had given up on love. They no longer considered themselves a part of the human community. They cared for no one and cared about no one, not even themselves. Where there is no love, there is no value for life. When hate consumes our hearts, all we can think of, all we desire, is to destroy.

When there is disengagement from human community, there is the potential for inhumanity.

The human heart was not created to be a cont...

This is where humanity has come. This is how far we’ve evolved. We strap bombs around our chests, lure innocents into our presence, and then consider ourselves heroes as we destroy everything around us. If this were not bad enough, for some it has become a proof of spirituality. There are people all around us waiting to EXPLODE! How many of us are walking around with fuses already lit? With the danger of oversimplifying, you are a danger to the world when you love nothing, and you’re even more dangerous when you love the wrong things. When there is a vacuum of love within your soul, hate, bitterness, envy, and racism rush to fill the empty space.

We stand in the midst of a human dilemma. We long for community; we long to belong; we long for love. Yet what we long for most we seem incapable of sustaining. Humanity has no natural predators except each other. We are safer in the jungle than in the city. We are our own worst enemies.

It was a brief encounter with a stranger whose name I never knew and whose face I can’t remember. What I can’t forget is how love and hate are never far apart.

Though perhaps this man’s life was played out at a more intense level, his story is nevertheless the human story. It is the story of us. And it comes with a warning on the label.

When we love, we are moved toward forgiveness. When we allow hate to take over, we begin to live for vengeance. If you dare to love and have felt the sting of betrayal, you could eventually justify a life of bitterness and cynicism. You might conclude, How could anyone blame me? If you’ve never found love, if you’ve never been loved, how can anyone expect you to live a life of love? After all, even the sincerest of us could eventually conclude that there is no such thing as love, that love is just a word for weakness. And most of us have been very, very weak.

Sex, unfortunately, is used as a shortcut to love. Sex can be the most intimate and beautiful expression of love, but we are only lying to ourselves when we act as if sex is proof of love. Too many men demand sex as proof of love; too many women have given sex in hopes of love. We live in a world of users where we abuse each other to dull the pain of our aloneness. We all long for intimacy, and physical contact can appear as intimacy, at least for a moment.

Is there any moment that feels more filled with loneliness than the second after having sex with someone who cares nothing about you? There is no such thing as free sex. It always comes at a cost. With it, either you give your heart, or you give your soul. It seems you can have sex without giving love, but you can’t have sex without giving a part of yourself.

When sex is an act of love, it is a gift. When sex is a substitute fo...

Have you ever met a fifty-five-year-old womanizer? It’s pretty sad really. Most of the ones I’ve known didn’t remain single on paper, just in principle. In and out of marriages, in and out of relationships, they point to their detachment as proof of their self-sufficiency. They are the guys in college guzzling the beer and swearing that they would be single for life. They probably should have kept that commitment. They looked so cool when they were twenty-two. Most guys, if they were honest, would admit that they envied them. What a life—get drunk, sleep with a stranger, throw up, sneak awkwardly out, avoiding all eye contact, get some sleep so you can go to church the ne...

Most of us know these guys just don’t get it. Love isn’t about volume. Love isn’t about conquest. When we live like this, there’s something deeper going on inside us that we’re trying to ignore, even drown out. We are alone, disconnected, and deficient in love. Deep down inside we know we cannot fill the vacuum within our soul...

Eventually it hits you: you cannot take love; you have to give it. Love is a gift that cannot be stolen. You may think you’re having a great time, but you’re actually wasting precious time. What feels cool at twenty-two leaves you cold at fifty-five. It’s funny how the people who are often described as great lovers are often unfamiliar with it. Western culture’s primary male icons have been Casanova, Don Juan, and Rudolph Valentino, and now it’s —— [you fill in the blank]. These, among others, are placed in the category of the world’s greatest lovers. We should consider this an insult to both men and love. Love is not about how many people we have used, but about how much we have cherished one person. I’ve come to find over time that players are the ones who are most afraid. They are afraid to love, an...

If you really believed you were capable of loving deeply and profoundly, what in the world would keep you from it? Is it that your heart so longs for love and longs ...

Then there are the people who believe in love but do not believe that they are worthy of it. You find them moving from one destructive relationship to another. What they call love, any reasonable person would call abuse. It’s almost impossible to understand why they choose to stay in those relationships. You can’t seem to talk them out of it. If you dare say anything about their partners, they are the first to defend them. They are held hostage by their need for love. They are made victims because they don’t believe they deserve love, so they s...

On a Sunday when I wasn’t speaking (great things happen when I’m not speaking), a wonderful friend named Chip Anderson was sharing. One thing he said struck McCall at the core: “If your soul is disconnected from its source, it will die.” Chip explained that we were created for God and that we cannot, in essence, live without him. If we would connect to him, he would make our souls fully alive. Even with her mantra “experience everything,” McCall knew this was one experience her soul was desperately lacking. “I wanted to get connected to this church so that I could get connected to my source so my soul would stop dying.”

My wife, Kim, has fallen in love with the story of The Notebook. Without giving away the plot (although it goes without saying there are no bombs, guns, special effects, action scenes, epic battles, just the basic chick-flick love triangle), there’s one line near the end that captured my attention. When James Garner’s character was asked to leave the retirement community where his wife was required to live due to her Alzheimer’s and go home with his grandchildren, his answer was, “Allie is my home.”

Home is ultimately not about a place to live but about the people with whom you are most fully alive. Home is about love, relationship, community, and belonging, and we are all searching for home.

It is human to crave love, and like a piece of technology that could live forever, that longing for love will exist as long as we exist. That, of course, is a part of the human dilemma—as long as we breathe, we will crave love. As long as we can take one more step, we will search for a place called home. And sometimes, like McCall, we will travel to faraway and strange places to find that which may be closer than we could ever imagine.

There is only one reason for God to come himself, because in issues of love, you just can’t have someone else stand in for you.

God is not passive, for love is never passive, but always passionate; and passion always leads to action.

All of us know how cold it is outside. It’s almost unbearable out there. Especially when we’re there alone, isolated, lonely. You were never meant to be . . . alone

LOVE CAN NEVER BE SIMPLY BETWEEN YOU AND GOD. IT can never be limited to that relationship. Jesus makes that clear. Love is more than the relationship between a man and a woman, no matter how extraordinary it may be. Love is ever expanding. Love always grows, not just deeper, but wider. Love always loves people more and always loves more people. Love calls us to community; love calls us to humanity; love calls us to each other.

When we belong to God, we belong to each other.

I WAS RECENTLY TALKING TO MY FRIEND MICK, WHO HAS struggled with alcoholism throughout his life. There were even times while he was working with our sound team that I knew the smell of alcohol wasn’t from the club we met in. There have even been times when Mick has disappeared and we’ve wondered if we’d lost him for good. It was great talking to him this past weekend. I asked Mick what he thought has kept him in our community over all these years filled with great highs and tremendous lows. He said, “Oh, that’s easy. There was always a place for me here. No one ever asked me to leave. No matter what I did, no one ever asked me to leave.”

There may be no greater proof of God than the power of community.

We are not healthy when we are alone. We find ourselves as we connect to others. Without community we don’t know who we are.

I think many of us out there have forgotten who we are, or maybe we’ve never really known. It’s been only in the past few years that the concept of self-awareness has become popularized. I think this is largely due to the fact that we are increasingly less self-aware. We’re more self-absorbed but less self-aware. We don’t know who we are.

I think a lot of us are like I have been, having never known my father. So many choices I have made in my life have been affected by the one person I haven’t known. I think a lot of us are like that with God. We’ve never known the Father who created us, and we were never created to live apart from him. My mom remarried, and thanks to Bill McManus, I was never fatherless in the classic sense, and for that I am grateful. Yet at the same time, there was always that nagging, that longing, that craving in my soul to know the man who would be my father. It is no different for us with God. If anything, it is far deeper and more profound. Our ability to know ourselves is dramatically diminished when we do not know our God and Father. Ironically, even if you do not believe in God, your life may be more shaped by your lack of relationship to Him than any other relationship in your life. Of this I’m convinced.

Somehow we know there are secrets in the universe waiting to be unlocked. The earth dangles in space somehow perfectly positioned to produce the only environment that would allow us to live. Any closer to the sun and we fry; any farther and we freeze. Make sense of that. Why should the liquid that covers almost all of the earth carry the exact composition necessary to sustain life? What if, instead of the blue planet, we were the green planet? Everything in creation speaks of God. God has created an entire universe to point us to Himself. Creation is thick with meaning. Everything around us demands that we explore, that we discover, that we understand.

The Jewish, Muslim, and Christian view of creation is all rooted in Genesis. The same text tells us that God is love. If this is true, then love is the motive behind all creation. Love is waiting to be discovered. The whole cosmos is wooing us to its Creator.

We’re polluting the water and the air, destroying the ozone, creating global warming. We’re pretty much making a wreck of the planet, but whoever designed it did a really great job. We’re supposed to be the highest and most advanced species in the ecosystem, but we’re ruining it all. Our best thinking isn’t even solving the problem, yet we think it all happened by accident. No intelligent design needed; it was all just an accident. How is that possible when we can’t even keep it in its former condition on purpose? It’s so much easier to believe that God was involved. It takes far less faith than it does to believe that coincidence can result in something so complex, something so amazing.

I’m not talking about the pervasive counterfeits we so often call love. But the kind that fables like The Princess Bride speak of—“true love.” The kind of love that lasts beyond life, that does not end with death, that fills you when you breathe deeply of it and wounds you when you lose it. Love is the most powerful force in the universe. God is love, and he is everywhere. Love is the essence of the cosmos. Love is the ethos of God.

Like far too many people, Ann was unwanted when she was born, and she was raised in an abusive environment where she was physically, emotionally, and sexually abused. One of her earliest memories is at the age of three, standing in front of her mother while being screamed at for doing something wrong that she cannot remember. What she does remember is that while facing the barrage of noise, she thought to herself, if she could just hold her breath long enough, she could go away and never come back—three years old and already trying to end her life. Years later she jumped from one abusive environment to another. She married a man who was a drug addict and alcoholic, and liked to beat her up. She recalls how one night, only weeks after her second son’s birth, her husband was out with another woman. She remembers getting up for the 2:00 A.M. feeding and feeling very much alone in the world. It was pouring down rain. She sat at the window and told God that she had always believed that he was out there, but if this was it, if this was the way life was, there was no point in living. In her own words she writes, “I began to suffer from the Mack truck syndrome. ‘Dear God, please let a Mack truck run over him.’ I thought of ways to kill my husband, kill myself, and kill my children so that my husband would not be able to lay a hand on them. Realizing the futility of these thoughts, I asked God to reveal himself to me if life mattered to him at all. He did. That night at 2 AM, I wen...

This is the great irony of the human story. When God does come to embrace us, to meet us face-to-face, to bring us into relationship with him, we far too often find ourselves betraying love. Yet his love is undeterred. He still pursues us with his relentless compassion. God is the passionate lover of humanity. He created you for love. You cannot live without love, and you do not have to. Yes, there is an insanity to love. You will go mad in pursuing it. You will despise life itself if you do not find it. Your soul craves love and will find satisfaction with nothing less. You shouldn’t be surprised that as you look for love, you keep running into God. Listen to your soul. You have not given yourself to a futile search. You are not alone in your pursuit. Love searches for you. Is it possible this is why the story won’t go away? Two thousand years later and somehow it is still strangely compelling. On a cross, Jesus of Nazareth hung naked and beaten for love. Talk about rejection. It would be easy to conclude that God made a fool of himself. What was he thinking to die for love? He gambled everything on the power of love. That love was more powerful than hate. That love was more powerful than death. What was he thinking to die for us, to give himself for you and for me, knowing we might just kiss him in the face and then walk away? Love’s just crazy like that.

ALL YOU NEED I S LOVE. God Is Love.