The Faith Cafe

Aristotle said that “nature abhors a vacuum.”

So do I, frankly. Perhaps I should simply stop vacuuming? After all, who am I to argue with Aristotle?

Seriously, though, what that phrase suggests is that empty spaces are unnatural, and somehow or other nature will seek to fill them.

I encountered a dramatic example of this truism through a friend of my late father.

This friend had developed a disorder called Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Macular degeneration had left voids or blank spots in his field of vision. The brain finds these empty spaces to be disturbing, so in Charles Bonnet Syndrome it fills in the blank areas with patterns or random images from its memory bank.

The result was that my father’s friend would “see” people or animals that weren’t actually there. His wife would have to tell him that, no, there wasn’t really a stranger sitting on their couch, or a cow in their backyard. The hallucinations he experienced were just his brain attempting to paper over the upsetting voids in his visual field.

It seems that human nature abhors a vacuum, too.

We all have voids or empty spaces in our lives that we seek to fill: areas of dissatisfaction, lack of love, or absence of validation. These blank areas make us uneasy, so we try to fill them up.

The problem is that we often choose things to fill our voids that don’t truly satisfy us in the end: alcohol, sex, money, shopping, busyness, or worldly acclaim. Despite all our efforts to paper over our pain, we can still find ourselves as empty as we were before.

What’s the solution? How do we find a lasting source of love and validation?

We need to fill the empty spaces in our lives by inviting God into them.