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4 min read

Understand what we thirst for

Whether for water or meaning, it’s a primal force.

Helen is a registered nurse and freelance writer, writing for audiences ranging from the general public to practitioners and scientists.

A child wearing a wool hat holds a glass and drink water from it.
Johnny McClung on Unsplash

Quenching thirst is a global problem. It can also be profoundly personal, impaired by illness. For nurses, it can be ethically and emotionally difficult, when treating dying patients. But is there ultimate relief? 

Thirst is the subjective sensation of a desire to drink something that cannot be ignored. The world is thirsty; globally, 703 million people lack access to clean water. That’s 1 in 10 people on the planet. 

Thirst is a life-saving warning system that tells your body to seek satisfaction through swallowing fluid. It works in partnership with other body processes - such as changes in blood pressure, heart rate and kidney function - to restore fluid, and salt, levels back to where they belong. Failure of any part of this beautifully balanced system leads to dehydration (or water intoxication), and perhaps to seizures, swelling of the brain, kidney failure, shock, coma and even death. 

Sometimes it’s difficult to quench thirst, because of problems with supply. According to the World Health Organization, at least 1.7 billion people used a drinking water source contaminated with faeces in 2022. Sometimes in war, water is weaponised, with systematic destruction of water sources and pipes. Water laced with rat fur, arsenic and copper has meanwhile been reported in prisons across the USA.  

At other times, there may be “water everywhere, but not a drop to drink” because of individual problems with swallowing. As a nurse, some of my most heartbreaking moments have been when I have been unable to fulfil a need as basic as a patient’s thirst; when even thickened fluids have led to intense coughing and distress, and a realisation that I can only moisten mouths and give so-called “taste for pleasure”: very small amounts of a favourite liquid or taste using a soft toothbrush, or a circular brush gently sweeping around the mouth and lips to release some of the liquid - even, and especially, at the end of life when the patient is unconscious. 

Difficulties in drinking are common in dementia when fluid can seem foreign and swallowing a surprise to the system. It’s thought that over 50 per cent of people in care homes have an impaired ability to eat or drink safely; 30 to 60 per cent  of people who have had a stroke and 50 per cent of those living with Parkinson’s may struggle to swallow. 

Other conditions that may affect swallowing include multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and head and neck cancers. Diabetes is characterised by a raging thirst owing to problems with insulin (diabetes mellitus) or an imbalance in antidiuretic hormone levels (diabetes insipidus). In intensive care, patients are predisposed to thirst through mechanical ventilation, receiving nothing by mouth, and as a side effect of some medications. But thirst is a “neglected area” in healthcare, writes palliative care researcher Dr Maria Friedrichsen.  

“Knowledge of thirst and thirst relief are not expressed, seldom discussed, there are no policy documents nor is thirst documented in the patient’s record. There is a need for nurses to take the lead in changing nursing practice regarding thirst.” 

Is there another thirst that is also being missed in nursing, and in life in general – a spiritual thirst, beyond the physical desire to drink? In his book, Living in Wonder, writer Rod Dreher argues that humans are made to be spiritual, and that a critical sixth sense has been lost in a “society so hooked on science and reason”. We humans crave love in our deepest selves; we have an insatiable thirst for everything which lies within – and beyond – ourselves. Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, who was later appointed professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna, became convinced that human beings have a basic “will for meaning.” “The striving to find a meaning in one’s life,” he wrote, “is the primary motivational force in man.”  

In the harsh sun of a Middle East day, an ancient story of a man and a woman encountering each other at a water well illustrates this dual thirst for water and meaning. The man, Jesus, thankful for a drink of water given to him at the well by an outcast Samaritan woman, said that “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” In that midday sun, such imagery made a powerful statement.  

Being mindful of spiritual thirst when drinking water is something also captured in a Ghanaian proverb and pictured perfectly in the many birds that drink by gravity, so tipping their heads back when they swallow.  

“Even the chicken, when it drinks, 

Lifts its head to heaven to thank God for the water”. 

Unsatisfied thirst is part of the human condition, we long for something more; it’s living proof of our immortality, says French poet Charles Baudelaire. Despite his Olympic success, athlete Adam Peaty said that society didn’t have the answers he was seeking, and that a gold medal was the coldest thing to wear. He “discovered something that was missing” when attending church for the first time, and now has a cross with the words “Into the Light” tattooed across his abdomen, symbolizing his spiritual awakening. We are more than mechanical machines with physical needs. We are rather gardens to tend in a dry and thirsty land, with souls in need of intensive care.   

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5 min read

Mapmaking our meaning in a modern world

Real ‘reasoning’ happens only when we have learned to trust one another.
A hand holds a pen over a map, at the side is closed journal and colour pencils.
Oxana v on Unsplash.

People first began to think about theology not because they were looking for intellectual stimulus or solutions to abstract problems, but because they found themselves living in an unsettling and vastly expanded ‘space’. They were conscious of new dimensions in their connection with each other, new dimensions in coping with their own fear, guilt, despair, a new sense of intimate access to the limitless reality of God. They connected these new experiences with the story of Jesus of Nazareth, executed by the Roman colonial government, reported by his closest friends as raised from death and present with them and their converts in the communication of divine ‘spirit.’ As we read Christian scripture, we are watching the first generations of Christian believers trying to construct a workable map of this unexpected territory. 

When I started writing the assorted pieces that make up the little book on Discovering Christianity (published earlier this year), my hope was above all to convey something of this sense of Christian thinking as a process of mapmaking in a new and bewildering landscape. That’s why one chapter – originally drafted for a Muslim audience – tried to list some of the things that an interested observer might spot in looking from outside at the habits of Christian believers: not first and foremost their spectacular and uniform embodiment of unconditional divine love (if only), but just the sorts of things they said and did, the sort of language used about Jesus, the rituals of induction and belonging. Indeed, if there is one biblical text I had in mind in virtually all the chapters, it is the simple phrase, ‘Come and see’ that Jesus uses in St John’s gospel when he is first followed by those who will become ‘disciples’, literally ‘learners.’ 

‘Come and see’. When we use language like that in everyday life, we’re encouraging others to share something that has excited or troubled us (or both). It’s not a proposal for solving a problem. It’s not even a recruitment campaign. It’s an invitation to stand where someone else is standing and look from there. In the rich symbolic context of John’s gospel, it’s about sharing Jesus’ ‘point of view’ – which is, as we’re told right at the start of the gospel, a point of view unimaginably close to the heart of eternal life and reality itself.  

We can only see in this way when we move away from our ordinary perceptions a bit. Just as we can only learn to swim when we have jumped into the water, so we shan’t learn what faith is all about until we have been prodded by whatever forces around us to take the risk of trusting that (so to speak) the ground is going to hold beneath us if we step forward (I like to speak sometimes about discovering what images, ideas, perspectives and relations are ‘load-bearing’ in our lives).  

So part of the invitation is also about telling the stories of those who have taken that kind of risk and what sort of lives they have shaped for themselves in the light of it. There is little point in summoning others just to share my individual set of feelings. But there is perhaps more weight is saying, ‘A lot of people have felt this shape beneath the surface, this grain running through things.’ Which is why – as the book seeks to explain – theology works with the ‘classical’ shared texts that most Christian communities found themselves reading together in the first hundred years after Jesus; and works also with the history of the arguments and diverse perceptions that reading brought into focus.  

We read and think in company; our theological reflection like the rest of our lives of faith is a shared, ‘conversational’ affair.

It's not unknown outside theology. We have become so much more interested over the last few decades in how to understand works of art not just in terms of what the artist ‘meant’, but in terms of what the actual work does or makes possible. What world does it create? So we read the Bible, obviously, but we also read the readers of the Bible (think of the Jewish Talmud, with the original text of its classical legal discussions literally surrounded on every page by the arguments that this text has generated). We read and think in company; our theological reflection like the rest of our lives of faith is a shared, ‘conversational’ affair. And so along with reading the Bible and immersing ourselves in the history of what sense others have made of the basic text and story, we also bring to bear the sorts of things that are part of our current conversations in society and culture – the habits of ‘reasoning’ that we have picked up.  

There is an important difference between talking about ‘reason’ as a sovereign, detached capacity and talking about ‘reasoning’, the range of processes and practices that carry forward a common life of intelligent learning (and that learning may be at any level of supposed ‘intellectual’ capacity; once more, it’s not about abstractions). Our society these days is fairly comprehensively confused about this: we have a mythological picture of some supremely obvious way of arguing that allows for no final dispute; we call it ‘science’; and then we expect the impossible of it and are disillusioned and sceptical when it can’t give us absolutely certain answers. One of the many ironies of our society is that we are besotted with ‘science’ and at the same time fascinated by the idea that there are many ‘truths’, or else suspicious that apparently objective sources are actually controlled by other interests. Real ‘reasoning’ happens only when we have learned to trust one another’: a long story, but an all-important element in our human discovery. 

Bible, tradition, human reasoning – those are the tools we bring to this job of mapmaking. The book is really just a meditation on those words, ‘Come and see’, as the basis of Christian thinking. At the centre of everything is a set of very ambitious claims about what God is like – and what we are like. Part of what we’re invited to ‘come and see’ is ourselves. Once again it’s not unlike what happens in a really good play or film, when we go away conscious that we have seen not just someone else’s story but something fresh about our own selves. 

And my greatest hope for the book is that it may prompt someone to look a bit harder, to listen in to how Christians talk – and in that moment find that they recognize what’s being said in some complicated and untidy way. One of the most vivid characters in the gospel I’ve been quoting says of Jesus that he has told her everything she has ever done. I hope that those who are moved to investigate a bit further will come to that same unsettling and exciting point where they see themselves freshly, and the new landscape begins to unfold.  

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