For the month of November, and carrying us through the first week of December, “Almost Christian” is doing something a little different. We are spending five weeks in Panem and working our way through all five novels in “The Hunger Games” series. Since November brings us Thanksgiving and, for Orthodox Christians, the beginning of the Nativity Fast, it seemed like the perfect time to talk about something that sits at the center of Suzanne Collins’ world: hunger.
We will begin chronologically with “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” move to Haymitch’s story in “Sunrise on the Reaping,” and then continue through “The Hunger Games,” “Catching Fire,” and “Mockingjay.” Each week will look at hunger from a different direction: hunger and fear, hunger as spectacle, bread and sacrifice, gluttony and abundance, and finally the deeper question of what human beings are actually hungry for. Together, the five articles will give us a chance to talk about fasting, feasting, thanksgiving, generosity, self-control, and the Christian understanding of food as a gift.
One quick note before we begin: I will primarily follow the novels because they give us considerably more of the characters’ thoughts and motivations, but I will also use scenes from the films throughout these articles. The books and movies are not identical, and occasionally those differences matter, but the major characters, events, and themes are close enough that scenes from the films can help us visualize what Collins is doing in the books. With that out of the way, our story begins not with Katniss Everdeen, but decades earlier with a hungry young man named Coriolanus Snow.
What Hunger Teaches Coriolanus Snow
When we first meet the future President Snow in “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” he is not the wealthy and terrifying ruler we know from the original trilogy. He is an eighteen-year-old student living in the Capitol with his grandmother and his cousin Tigris (Side note: the movie does an absolute injustice to Tigris by using a trans actor for this part, while also completely ignoring Tigris’s important role in helping Snow survive and supporting him and their family during his rise to power.) The Snow family still has its famous name, but much of its wealth is gone.
Most importantly for our purposes, Coriolanus knows what it means to be hungry. The war damaged the Capitol, destroyed his family’s fortune, and left memories of starvation that continue to shape him. He knows the anxiety of wondering where food will come from, even while desperately trying to maintain the appearance that the Snow family remains wealthy.
That gives the novel one of its great moral questions. What will suffering teach us? We sometimes assume that suffering automatically makes people better, kinder, or more compassionate. Christianity makes no such promise.
Two people can endure similar suffering and emerge from it very differently. One may become more merciful because he remembers what it was like to hurt. Another may become harder because he decides that he will do whatever is necessary to make sure he is never vulnerable again. Coriolanus Snow increasingly chooses the second path.
Hunger Can Teach Gratitude, or It Can Teach Fear
Snow Knows What an Empty Stomach Feels Like
This matters because Snow cannot claim ignorance about deprivation. He does not grow up completely sheltered from the suffering that eventually defines life in the districts. Hunger is part of his own childhood memory.
That could have become the foundation for compassion. A man who remembers being hungry might see a starving child and remember himself. He might become more generous precisely because he knows how frightening it is not to have enough.
Instead, Snow increasingly learns a different lesson: never be weak again. Never allow yourself to depend upon someone else. Never lose control. Hunger becomes connected not primarily with compassion, but with fear.
Suffering Does Not Automatically Make Us Holy
This is an important Christian correction to the way we sometimes speak about suffering. Suffering can become spiritually fruitful, but pain itself does not sanctify us. What matters is how we respond to it.
The same hardship that makes one person compassionate can make another bitter. Poverty can teach generosity, but it can also produce hoarding. Rejection can teach compassion, but it can also produce resentment. Fear can drive us toward God, or it can convince us that we must control everything ourselves.
Orthodox Christianity does not teach us to seek suffering for its own sake. Rather, when suffering comes, we ask God to use even that suffering for repentance, humility, patience, and love. Snow’s tragedy is not simply that terrible things happened to him. It is that he increasingly allows those experiences to justify what he is becoming.
The Appearance of Being Full
Snow’s hunger is made even more complicated by pride. The Snow family has lost much of its wealth, but Coriolanus desperately wants everyone to believe that the family remains powerful and prosperous. Appearances matter enormously to him.
That creates a strange situation. Snow may be hungry, but he cannot allow people to know that he is hungry. He has to look full.
There is something spiritually recognizable about that. We spend enormous amounts of energy making ourselves appear successful, happy, confident, holy, financially secure, or completely in control. Sometimes we become more concerned with looking whole than actually being healed.
Christianity requires the opposite movement. Repentance begins with truth. We cannot bring our wounds, sins, fears, and hungers before God if we are committed to pretending that we do not have any.
Two Different Responses to Scarcity
Tigris gives us an important contrast. She has experienced much of the same family loss and scarcity as Coriolanus, but she does not respond to it in exactly the same way. Her suffering does not lead her toward the same hunger for domination.
That distinction matters because it prevents us from excusing Snow as simply the inevitable product of his environment. His circumstances shape him, certainly. They help us understand him, but understanding why someone makes a choice is not the same thing as saying that the choice was unavoidable.
Orthodox Christians believe human beings possess genuine freedom, even though that freedom is wounded by sin and influenced by circumstances. We are shaped by our families, cultures, wounds, fears, habits, and experiences, but we are not merely machines programmed by them. We remain morally responsible for what we do with what we have received.
What Does Hunger Teach Us?
This brings us directly into the Nativity Fast. Most Orthodox Christians reading this article will never experience anything remotely resembling the starvation found in Panem. Choosing not to eat meat on a Wednesday is not the same thing as wondering whether your family will eat at all.
That distinction is extremely important. Christian fasting is voluntary. Starvation is not. We should never romanticize poverty or pretend that people who cannot afford food are somehow receiving an automatic spiritual advantage.
But voluntary fasting allows us, in a very small way, to confront our relationship with hunger. We intentionally tell the stomach that it does not always get what it wants when it wants it. We discover very quickly how much power appetite can exercise over us.
Fasting Is Not About Hating Food
The Orthodox Church does not fast because food is evil. Christianity teaches exactly the opposite. Food is good because creation is good, and creation comes from God.
This is why fasting and Thanksgiving do not actually contradict one another. We can only fast from something that is good. Giving something up for a time teaches us to receive it again with gratitude rather than entitlement.
If food were evil, abstaining from it would not be fasting. It would simply be avoiding evil. Christian fasting has meaning precisely because we temporarily abstain from good things for a greater spiritual purpose.
The Manna Snow Never Learns to Trust
The story of Israel receiving manna in Exodus 16 gives us an almost perfect biblical contrast to Snow. Israel is hungry in the wilderness, and God provides bread from heaven. But He also gives instructions about how the manna is to be gathered.
The people are to gather what they need. When some attempt to hoard it against God’s command, the excess spoils. The lesson is not merely about bread. Israel is being taught dependence.
God is teaching His people that their lives do not depend entirely upon their ability to accumulate, control, and protect themselves. They must learn to receive. Snow moves steadily in the opposite direction.
His experience of hunger teaches him that security comes from making himself powerful enough that nobody can ever place him in that position again. Where manna teaches trust, Snow learns control.
Fear Wants to Hoard
Most of us are not trying to become president of Panem, but Snow’s temptation is much more ordinary than it first appears. Fear makes us want to hold tightly to whatever makes us feel safe.
We can hoard money because we fear not having enough. We can hoard possessions because they make us feel secure. We can even hoard time, attention, affection, or influence because we are afraid that giving them away will leave us with less.
Fasting begins loosening that grip. It teaches us that we can have something available to us and still choose not to consume it. That little act of voluntary restraint begins training the heart to say, “I do not need to possess everything simply because I can.”
Fasting Should Make Us Notice the Hungry
This is where Christian fasting becomes much more demanding than simply checking ingredients on a package. The prophet Isaiah condemns fasting that remains disconnected from mercy. In Isaiah 58, God rebukes people who perform the outward act of fasting while continuing to neglect justice and the needs of others.
A Christian who gives up meat but becomes cruel, proud, angry, and indifferent to the poor has misunderstood the fast. St. John Chrysostom repeatedly warns Christians against reducing fasting to food while neglecting the transformation of the whole person. The stomach may be fasting while the tongue continues devouring our neighbor.
Fasting should make us more aware of people whose hunger is not voluntary. If my small experience of going without never makes me more generous toward someone who genuinely has less, then I have missed one of the lessons the fast is trying to teach me.
Thanksgiving Is More Than Saying Thank You
This is also why “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” is such an interesting place to begin a series during November. Thanksgiving is approaching at almost exactly the same time Orthodox Christians enter the Nativity Fast. One part of American culture is telling us to feast while the Church is teaching us to fast.
Those messages do not have to be enemies. Both can teach us how to receive. Thanksgiving says that what sits before us should be received with gratitude. Fasting says that we should not become enslaved to the gift.
The Christian response to abundance is neither guilt nor mindless consumption. It is thanksgiving. We receive what God gives, bless Him for it, enjoy His gifts rightly, and remember that what has been placed into our hands can also be shared.
A Full Table Should Make Us Generous
Imagine sitting at a Thanksgiving table overflowing with food and saying a beautiful prayer thanking God for everything He has provided. That prayer is good. But thanksgiving cannot end when we say “Amen.”
If recognizing that we have been given much does not make us more generous, then our gratitude has remained incomplete. The natural Christian response to receiving a gift is eventually to become a giver.
Jesus Christ makes this impossible to ignore in Matthew 25:35: “I was hungry and you gave me food.” Our treatment of the hungry is not a minor social concern sitting somewhere at the edge of Christianity. Our Lord places it directly within our response to Him.
This is why fasting and almsgiving have always belonged together in historic Christianity. We consume less so that we can give more. The food we do not eat is not supposed to become merely extra money sitting in our bank account.
Snow Learns the Wrong Lesson From Hunger
This is ultimately what makes young Coriolanus Snow so tragic. He knows what hunger feels like. He knows what fear feels like. He knows what it means to lose security and wonder whether the life his family once enjoyed will ever return.
But instead of allowing that memory to open his heart toward others who suffer, he increasingly allows it to justify his need for power. He does not want a world where nobody has to experience what he experienced. He wants to become the kind of man who can make certain it never happens to him again.
That difference is enormous. One response to suffering says, “I remember how badly this hurt, so I do not want anyone else to experience it.” The other says, “I remember how badly this hurt, so I will make sure nobody ever has the power to do it to me again.”
The first can become compassion. The second can become domination.
Hunger Becomes a Weapon
We know where Snow’s story eventually leads. The hungry young man grows into the ruler of a nation where hunger itself helps maintain control. The districts produce goods for the Capitol while many of their own people live with scarcity.
That makes his childhood experience even darker in retrospect. Snow knows exactly what hunger can do to a human being. Instead of destroying the system that uses deprivation to create fear, he eventually becomes one of its greatest defenders.
This is one reason our response to suffering matters so much. Wounds that are not healed can become wounds we inflict on other people. Fear that is never surrendered can become a reason to control everyone around us.
Orthodox Christianity calls us toward healing precisely so that the evil done to us does not become the evil we pass on. Repentance interrupts the cycle.
Lucy Gray Shows Snow Another Way
Lucy Gray Baird complicates Snow’s world because she cannot be reduced to one of his categories. She is vulnerable in ways Snow understands, yet she possesses a freedom he increasingly lacks. He wants to protect her, but his desire to protect gradually becomes mixed with his desire to possess and control.
This reveals that Snow’s deepest hunger is no longer simply for food. He hungers for security, status, success, recognition, and eventually control. Those desires begin feeding one another.
That is how the passions often work. A legitimate desire becomes disordered when it escapes its proper place. Wanting food is natural. Wanting safety is natural. Wanting love is natural. But any of these can become spiritually destructive when possessing them becomes more important than loving God and our neighbor.
Fasting Reveals What Controls Us
This is one reason fasting can be uncomfortable in ways that have very little to do with hunger. Take away something we are accustomed to having whenever we want it, and suddenly we discover how attached we have become.
Maybe it is food. Maybe it is alcohol, entertainment, social media, shopping, attention, or always getting our own way. The fast has a remarkable ability to expose the little rulers hiding inside us.
That does not mean we conquer the passions by willpower alone. Orthodox asceticism is always rooted in the grace of God. We struggle, fall, repent, get back up, and gradually learn that freedom does not mean satisfying every desire.
Freedom means being able to say no.
The Fast Is Training Us to Receive Christmas
The Nativity Fast is ultimately not about proving how disciplined we can be. It prepares us to receive the Nativity of Christ. We make room because Someone is coming.
That makes Jack Skellington’s mistake from our previous “Almost Christian” article an interesting contrast as we move into November. We do not prepare for Christmas by possessing it, controlling it, or consuming as much of it as possible. We prepare by learning to receive.
The Church gives us prayer, fasting, confession, generosity, worship, and repentance because our hearts need preparation. Christmas is not merely a date on the calendar or a season of consumption. It is the celebration of God entering His creation for our salvation.
What Will Our Hunger Make of Us?
“The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” gives us a young Coriolanus Snow before he becomes the man we already know he will become. That is part of what makes the story unsettling. We watch choices slowly harden into character.
Snow’s hunger could have taught him compassion. His losses could have taught him mercy. His fear could have taught him dependence. Instead, he increasingly chooses control.
The Christian life places the same basic question before us, even if our circumstances are very different. What will our hunger make of us? When we experience need, disappointment, insecurity, or suffering, will those things teach us to grasp more tightly or open our hands?
That is where our five-week journey through Panem begins. Before we talk about Katniss and Peeta sharing bread, the Capitol consuming while others starve, or the deeper hungers that drive a nation toward war, we have to begin with a young man who was once hungry and never learned how to receive hunger as an invitation to compassion.
Fasting gives us another way. It teaches us that hunger does not have to produce fear. Hunger can remind us that we are dependent, that creation is gift, that our neighbor may be hungry too, and that no amount of food, wealth, status, or control can satisfy the deepest hunger of the human heart.
Next week, we move forward decades to the Fiftieth Hunger Games and a young Haymitch Abernathy in “Sunrise on the Reaping.” There the question changes. We will move from what hunger does to the person experiencing it to something even darker: what happens when comfortable people learn to consume the suffering of the hungry as entertainment.
If you have a film, song, book, television series, or other piece of media you would like me to cover in a future “Almost Christian” article, send your suggestion to me, Fr. Stephen, at frsteve@savannahorthodox.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main message of “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”?
The novel explores how Coriolanus Snow becomes the man who will eventually rule Panem. Among its major themes are power, control, fear, ambition, scarcity, moral choice, and the ways people respond differently to suffering.
Why is food important in “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”?
Food represents far more than physical survival. Snow’s memories of hunger shape his fear of vulnerability, while the contrast between scarcity and abundance helps reveal how differently characters respond to insecurity and power.
Why do Orthodox Christians fast before Christmas?
The Nativity Fast prepares Christians for the celebration of the birth of Christ through prayer, repentance, fasting, generosity, and worship. Fasting is not a rejection of food, but a way of learning self-control and receiving God’s gifts with greater thanksgiving.
What does the Bible say about fasting and helping the hungry?
Isaiah 58 directly connects true fasting with mercy, justice, and care for those in need. Christ also identifies Himself with the hungry in Matthew 25:35, teaching that feeding those in need is part of our response to Him.
Is “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” Christian?
No. The novel is not a Christian story, neither is the movie, but its treatment of hunger, fear, moral responsibility, power, and human freedom raises questions that Christianity answers in a deeper way. It gives us fragments worth examining while the fullness of the answer is found in the life of the Church.
