Parched by BenedictFrancis

The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass (62).

Augustine famously said of God in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are rest-less till they find their rest in you.” Others have simply reformulated this as the “God-shaped hole,” the “terrifying bottomless abyss opening up inside us which we would do anything to fill” (Source). Yet perhaps Weil’s vision is a little more apt: it’s not a single hole, but a series of fissures that permeate our whole existence. That goes a long way in explaining why we’re so apt at blocking the various graces that we experience on a daily basis. We’re like kids with buckets of mud after an earthquake, trying to seal this crack, that fissure with something completely inadequate.

As alluded to earlier, Father Robert Barron rightly compares the substitutes with which we fill these holes to addictions. The analogy couldn’t be more apt. Addictions control us; we react without thinking through our conditioned addictions, and that false consistency — always “knowing” how to respond — gives us some sort of emotional comfort that accompanies the physical or psychological “comfort” that most addictions provide. And yet it is our addictions that close us off from so many positives in the world. Indeed, addiction in its severest form can become our world, at which point I suppose we’re living our whole life in a small little crack through which grace could enter.