It is a well-known phrase, and the experience that we lack something without the presence of God is central to Christian life (and the life of many other faiths). In the Christian tradition it is, perhaps, most famously expressed in St Augustin’s Confessions, where almost the first statement in his autobiographical account of his faith is about a yearning for God:
You made us for yourself, and our heart is restless, until it rests in you…Since I exist, why do I seek that you should enter into me, since I am not, unless you are in me?
Yet this puzzlement in his first chapter about where to find God and who God is, is also a profound expression of our own puzzlement. How does one fill a God-shaped hole if one cannot find the thing that will fill it?
The language, of course, gives the game away. One is not looking for a ‘thing’, but for ‘no-thing’; in Augustine’s view, for ‘that without which I would not exist.’ The realisation that we are not looking for a ‘thing’ to complete us, not looking for something to ‘put in’ the God-shaped hole is expressed by Blaise Pascal in his Pensées, which is the source of the phrase. The phrase is a misquote; ‘hole’ is better translated as ‘abyss’, or ‘void’, and in his discussion of a search for true happiness, Pascal goes through a list of all those things that will not make the void disappear, ranging from the stars to cabbages. He writes:
What is it that this desire for happiness and this inability to acquire it proclaim to us, other than that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remains to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.
Pascal’s use of the word ‘object’ to describe God, is, of course misleading, but language is always strained to the limit in referring to that without which nothing would exist, without which the world and everything we know would disappear like a bursting soap bubble. Fortunately, the belief that God is eternal – indeed beyond eternity – means that this is something we do not have to worry about. Grammatically, though, God is never the object, he is always the subject, without whom nothing happens and no sentence that makes any sense is possible.
We are left, however, with the unknowability. Maybe the most difficult thing to acknowledge in a life of faith is that the void or hole, the abyss, to some extent remains, and resting there, both in activity and inactivity, waiting for God’s presence is the work we are called to. It sounds bleak, but it is not so in experience. It is a faithful waiting for God, who does come, at his initiative and not ours, to show us that we do not exist separately from him.
text © Jonathan Smith Shoreham-by-Sea Julian Meeting
image Pablo Carlos Budassi, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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