The God-Shaped Hole in the Human Soul
Explores the concept of a "God-shaped hole" in the human soul, emphasizing the spiritual quest for fulfillment, the nature of divine presence, and insights from historical thinkers like Pascal and Augustine.
library.iusb.eduSpiritual desire is the drive that God put in us from the beginning, for total satisfaction, for home, for heaven, for divine union, and it just got displaced onto the wrong object.
since our hearts are made to find their end in God, we will experience a besetting anxiety and restlessness when we try to love substitutes.
The longing that Augustine describes is less like curiosity and more like hunger—less like an intellectual puzzle to be solved and more like a craving for sustenance (see Ps. 42:1–2).
That’s not necessarily because you’ve been looking for God, but because you’ve been trying to find yourself. When you go spelunking in the caves of your soul with Augustine, you might be surprised who you meet down there.
C. S. Lewis says at the end of his great chapter on hope, reorient the entire focus of your life toward God. He concludes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world [something supernatural and eternal].”35
For Augustine, we are made for joy. Joy is another name for the rest we find when we give ourselves over to the One who, for the joy that was set before him, gave himself for us. We find joy when we look for the satisfaction of our hungers in the Triune God who will never leave us or forsake us, when we find our enjoyment in an immortal God whose l
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