Recently while in a Duluth checkout line, I heard this: “I’m not sure I’ll be satisfied with this …I’ve spent months looking at choices. One looks good, then another. Bet when I get home, I’ll still not be satisfied. Maybe if this one was a different dark-blue, you know, maybe a medium dark-blue.”
It seems that “endless choices” are a marketing tool. One choice rules out all other choices, and we are left thinking, “Did I pick the right one?” This leads people to want a replacement long before their choice is close to being “worn out.”
So how do we get satisfied with our decisions? Or maybe satisfaction is about something else, perhaps a deeper, far deeper, desire. Perhaps our everyday-life dissatisfactions are only substitutes for our fuller quest.
We are not robots repeating endlessly, “pick-the-widget-on-second-shelf. Place-in-shopping-basket. Arrive-at-destination. Use-as-directed; Pick-widget-on-third-shelf; repeat.”
Rather, we are humans, for whom a true satisfaction is based on relationships. With self. With the beauty of nature, with storms in sea or sky, as we exclaim over and over, “look at that!” even when the exclamation is only to self or to that which we are seeing and experiencing. Or with what/who/ that is Which Creates and initialized Creation.
This desire/need/mystery is not new, though, for humans. Art (even in 20,000-year-old cave paintings), archeology, and ancient writings show us peoples coming together, moving away, going new directions, striving for new ways, new connections, new peoples, new places, new inventions, new….well, the list would be endless.
Sometimes, no doubt, satisfaction came with a better-designed sail, a better rudder, a better tool for hoeing crops, a better container to keep mice out of a winter’s food supply. Or with another some one, or another community, or another geography, or with a new-look at self.
Being dissatisfied can lead to new discoveries, to greater dissatisfactions, or to both. A question in today’s era may be this: Does the speed of dissatisfaction lead to greater “unsatisfied-ness.”
Might that be a root of shootings and killings in places of education, in places of natural beauty, in places of worship? National parks, grade schools, high schools; in Las Vegas at an outdoor concert. Centers for varying faiths in Texas, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Pittsburgh; at a rally for community peace in Dallas. And now, shootings and death in Mosques in New Zealand.
I’m sure if my grasp of world events was greater, the list would be longer and include such killings as those by powerful leaders and by groups wanting to take over whole regions of geography and destroy any who disagree.
What is missing, or what is happening in lives who think they will find satisfaction in causing drastic, painful, isolating events? Answers from sociology, psychology, health agencies, parents, and each one of us may differ. For people of many faiths there is realization that we are searching for what we cannot on our own provide, for authentic and deep satisfaction comes not from us.
The Book of Isaiah, in the Hebrew Testament, was written about 2700 years ago. Here Jews, Christians, and many others find insight in an invitation from Yahweh, from God…
“To everyone who thirsts, come to the waters…you that have no resources, come, eat without price. Incline your ear, come, listen…Why do you labor for that which does not satisfy? I, the Loving Creator, make with you an everlasting covenant: my steadfast, sure love.”
It is That Which Satisfies in a whole other way, and which Satisfies even when we know not what we seek. “Everyone, come…to the waters of mercy, come, to that which Satisfies…Incline your ear…Come.”
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month our contributor is Pastor Kris Garey, Trinity Lutheran Church, Hovland.
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