That God-shaped Hole

© 2021 by Vernon Miles Kerr and VernonMilesKerr.com  –  Originally posted to Twitter as a rough draft on 11/18/2021

During my 20-year journey, from atheism to #Religiosity, with a jail-break to agnosticism, the church said, “There’s a God-shaped hole in everyone that’s yearning to be filled.”  I wonder if that lonely yearning, common to many of us, is a sub-conscious pining for our mothers.  One hears of dying soldiers, with their last breath, crying out for their mothers. The phenomenon is apparently frequent enough to be of note. 

If this is true, then #Religiosity takes full advantage of it and offers a palliative that seems to work for many.  It didn’t seem to work for me.  I’ve never been able to escape that feeling of a vacant soul.  If that vacancy is a yearning for my mother, then even when she was alive, it was impossible to return to infancy, of course.  Both of us were different people, and far removed from that confluence of place and time:  that long-lost moment of complete security and of total acceptance.