Series: February 2025
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
"God Shaped Hole or…”"
Have you ever heard we have a “God-shaped hole” in us? It’s an old notion. I first heard it working with youth. There is space in our lives that can only really be filled by God, no matter how hard we try to fill it with other things, and Lord knows we try. I even found a novel with the title, God-Shaped Holethat included this passage:
We’re all searching for something to fill up what I like to call that big, God-shaped hole in our souls. Some people use alcohol, or sex, or their children, or food, or money, or music, or heroin. A lot of people even use the concept of God itself. I could go on and on. I used to know a girl who used shoes. She had over two-hundred pairs. But it’s all the same thing, really. People, for some stupid reason, think they can escape their sorrows.[1]
The image is helpful for identifying all we do to fill our lives with things that ultimately do not fill us as we avoid what needs to be faced or felt. I wonder what we would add to the list—work, busyness, endless distraction? Not everything we attempt to put in that God-shaped hole is bad, just out of proportion, out of place. Have you examined what you are filling your life with and whether it fits the role you’ve asked of it?
As we continue our Psalm series, we hear an ancient poetic expression of the deep craving only the holy can fill. Psalm 62:
Psalm 62
1For God alone my soul waits in silence;
from God comes my salvation.
2God alone is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall never be shaken.
3How long will you assail a person,
will you batter your victim, all of you,
as you would a leaning wall, a tottering fence?
4Their only plan is to bring down a person of prominence.
They take pleasure in falsehood;
they bless with their mouths,
but inwardly they curse.
5For God alone my soul waits in silence,
for my hope is from God.
6God alone is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be shaken.
7On God rests my deliverance and my honour;
my mighty rock, my refuge is in God.
8Trust in God at all times, O people;
pour out your heart before God ;
God is a refuge for us.
9Those of low estate are but a breath,
those of high estate are a delusion;
in the balances they go up;
they are together lighter than a breath.
10Put no confidence in extortion,
and set no vain hopes on robbery;
if riches increase, do not set your heart on them.
11Once God has spoken;
twice have I heard this:
that power belongs to God,
12 and steadfast love belongs to you, O Lord.
For you repay to all
according to their work.
“For God alone my soul waits in silence…God alone is my rock and my salvation, and my fortress; I shall never be shaken.” Does the fact so many seem so shaken so much of the time mean they, or we, are without God? Are we turning to that which cannot truly steady us? We have remarked in here before on the work that’s been done linking the decline of religious participation with the increase in political fervor, much to the detriment of our society. It’s dangerous to put someone else in the so-called God space, but that is exactly what we are seeing people do.
Everyone from Freud to Plato in the non-Christian context, to the theologies of Augustine and Origen, speak of this soul-longing. One person often cited for his articulation of the God-shaped hole is Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and Christian philosopher (an apparent underachiever). Pascal wrote this, and you’ll forgive the original masculine language:
What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.[2]
There is a lot there. Two aspects for us to examine a little further today. First, Pascal describes our craving as a form of forgetting of that which we once had. This notion persists in popular culture. I dug up an old vignette that apparently appears in Chicken Soup for the Soul collection, that book which was intended to do just what it’s title suggests, make you feel good when you’re feeling sick in the soul. It features a story of a young child who asks to be alone with her new baby sibling. The parents say yes, but decide to listen and peak through the cracked door just to be sure everything is okay, both children being so young. They hear the girl lean over and say to the baby, “Baby, tell me what God feels like. I’m starting to forget.”[3] I have no way of proving the veracity of the story, but, after all, I quote the Bible. These stories speak truth on a deeper level.
The story says there is an original connection that has been severed. It’s a way of explaining some of the mystery and disconnection we experience in this life. Our quest is to rediscover this connection, to invite back this God back in. Maybe this is helpful way of thinking about it for you.
Second, Pascal takes us to the vacuous source of our anxiety, what he calls, “this infinite abyss.” There is an existential terror of being a finite being. Death is always lurking. Perhaps some go through life hardly ever thinking about it. Must be nice. Pascal says the only thing that can fill that abyss is “an infinite and immutable object, in other words…God.”[4] That’s a lot to bring up, but it’s always there, so better to look it straight in the face now and again. The Buddhists are better at practicing this. Faith should give us peace in the face of that we have trouble facing.
I wonder, however, if we have been looking at this wrong, or at least there is another way to look at it that may even be more helpful. As I was wrestling with this theme, something kept bothering me. At one point I was reading this long scholarly article on the notion of a God-Shaped Hole,[5]a thorough treatment of the subject, but I kept waiting for the author to problematize the notion. There was a persistent nagging within me that we were missing something. Maybe that was my soul remembering.
I haven’t fully worked this out, but there are a few things that strike me as insufficient about the God-shaped hole image. First, it presumes only people who believe in God can be full, complete, whole, and the problem is I have encountered too many people who profess no faith or a theistic one and yet seem plenty full especially compared to some who claim to “have God” but embody no evidence of it.
Then there is the assumption that we start empty or severed from God. We are born with a hole in our heart. This is the stain original sin has left on our tradition, doctrine not even conceived of until the fourth century, and an ill-conceived one at that. It may have be one way to make sense of how people can be cruel, but I am not willing to accept that this is our birthright (or “birthwrong”). Moreover, it’s awfully convenient for a church to say you are born missing something that only we can facilitate giving you. Let’s skip the gambit altogether.
Even if we did have a hole of some sort within us, the notion we just have to plug a uniform God-shaped piece in it doesn’t honor our different experiences of the abyss. Again, the idea that we have what everyone needs is the kind of thinking that has gotten us into trouble all over the planet, not to mention leading scores leaving the faith right here.
I ultimately think the idea of a God-shaped hole is a generous one, meant to help us realize how to attend to deepest yearnings of our souls, and that’s helpful even if insufficient.
There may be another way of thinking about this and we find it simply by reversing the terms. What if we don’t have a God-shaped hole in our lives? What if we have a hole-shaped God? By that, what I mean is what if rather than like being a solid prefabricated piece, God is more like water, flowing wherever the space is? Why is it that into some of the hardest places that open in our lives is where God shows up? I have heard people, as much as it’s hard for me to believe, express gratitude for having cancer. They can’t even fully explain it to someone who doesn’t have cancer. Others is times of brokenness or loss, these spaces where nothing else can go, but God can and does. A hole-shaped God is the one who meets us exactly where we are in ways that we need.
Holes also aren’t only the bad spaces, but the openings created by moments of awe. When there’s nothing we can say to articulate an ecstatic or awe-filled experience, that’s our awareness of God. To that end, we can practice making space into which God can flow. That’s another way of thinking about prayer. At the 8:30 service two weeks ago, we spent time doing a meditative reading of the scripture, one that included a lot of quiet and God-inviting space. I don’t know if you experienced it, but I certainly felt as though something changed in the room. We are going to need that practice in our lives right now. We are in a really tough time. There are some alarming things happening. We make space God not as an alternative action, but to shape it. If we are to confront them faithfully, we need to be make lots of room for the divine within us, so that what in turn flows out of us flows ultimately from the love of God.
Inviting in the hole-shaped God is our best chance of ever becoming whole.
Amen.
[1]Tiffanie DeBartolo, God-Shaped Hole
[2]Blaise Pascal, Pensees (10.148).
[3]Dan Millman, https://boundlessgratitudes.com/blogs/awakening-stories/sachi-by-dan-millmanor as appears in Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen.
[4]Blaise Pascal, Pensees (10.148).
[5]Glenn F. Chesnut, “The God-Shaped Hole in the Human Soul” available online at https://library.iusb.edu/search-find/archives/gcarchive/docs/writ-god-shaped.pdf