The Hole in our Souls

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Bastille, a British rock band, was formed only in 2010, but by the beginning of this year, it had sold over 2.07 million records in the UK alone. Maybe it’s because of lyrics like these in its hit song, Flaws, which religious people could nominate as a theme song for “original sin.”

The song is presumably addressed to a girl/boyfriend, but it might easily be about the primordial yearning felt by people who search for God.

All of your flaws and all of my flaws
They lie there, hand in hand
Ones we've inherited, ones that we learned
They pass from man to man

There's a hole in my soul
I can't fill it, I can't fill it
There's a hole in my soul
Can you fill it? Can you fill it?

Many of us are walking around with holes in our souls because if God isn’t in our lives, the obvious question is, “Is this all there is?” That’s true even if our lives are good, filled with family, friends and happiness. We should be grateful for these, of course, but the prayer of that famous fifth century philosopher and theologian, St. Augustine, is applicable: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

As a reporter, I once did a story about a guy who worked for the state who said he was making too much money. What a marvel! It was a true “dog bites man” story, the kind the media can’t resist. That’s because most of us just can’t get enough – of money, stuff, prestige, attention, respect. We’re like Bill Murray in the 1991 movie, “What About Bob,” who pathetically pleads with Richard Dreyfuss, his therapist, “Gimme, gimme. I need, I need.”

Oddly, once we get what we crave, the thrill often fades and we want something – or someone – new. Fact is, except for people who are piteously superficial, no thing (and let’s admit it) no person can adequately fill that hole in our soul.    

“Soul,” by the way, is another of those words that is no longer just “churchy.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church says “…every spiritual soul is created immediately by God… (and is) immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death….” The traditional view is that body and soul were put together at conception and are separated at death, providing one of the principal reasons Christians have opposed abortion, assisted suicide, and arguably, war. God gives life; we don’t have the right to take it from ourselves or others.

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“Soul” now has come to be a sort of poetic reservoir of our deepest feelings. Its meaning has converged with that of “heart,” said to be mentioned over 1,000 times in the Bible. “The ancients were unaware of the circulation of blood and the physiological functions of the heart,” writes John L. McKenzie in his Dictionary of the Bible; “but its emotional reaction is easily recognized, and the heart is the chief bodily focus of emotional activity.”

Ok, so there are holes in our souls that only God can fill. Problem is, God appears to be missing in action. If God exists, I didn’t get the memo. But is it possible that our culture and our miserable attention span don’t allow us to see the obvious?

A few weeks ago, I quoted remarks recently made at a funeral by my friend, Jim Hardy, with whom I worked in Bolivia. His discourse provides insight on the search for God.

“If all that lives is holy: herbs, flowers, animals and every person of every race, then we are indeed surrounded by the sacred. The divine is commonplace. Searching for the presence of God? No need to book a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; take the 27^th Street bus across town.

“I do not wish to sound flippant in making such an observation because the search for the divine is for many, maybe most, far more difficult than a bus trip. It is a desperate mission. Good people, even after a long life, will confess that God remains for the most part hidden and at important moments, inaccessible.”

Many of us, at one time or another, may have asked for a sign. “If only I could, like Moses, see the burning bush and hear its voice, the unmistakable voice of God,” Jim writes, “I would never again waver; I would be a rock of allegiance and a pillar of faith.”

“On an ordinary day,” he says, “there are 400 billion suns in our Milky Way galaxy alone that burn and explode in cataclysmic fashion, with a ferocity beyond the limits of even a healthy imagination. The very effort to get one’s mind around that phenomenon can cause one’s knees to buckle. This is an ordinary day. That is an extraordinary fire; albeit in a remote outpost of God’s kingdom. Does it rival Moses’ bush? Is that heavenly flame more accessible?”

Not moved by the splendor of the universe? How about the goodness and kindness of ordinary people – our family members, people who wait on us in restaurants, bars and stores, perfect strangers on the street? Can we not find God there?

Maybe we could fill the hole in our souls by not allowing our culture, or our chronic distraction by people and things, to deter us from finding God in the obvious.