Pascal: the God-shaped gap

Thursday, March 25, 2021
    Feast of the Annunciation of our Lord to the Virgin Mary
Meditation:
    “The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD. Men will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it.”
    —Amos 8:11-12 (NIV)
Quotation:
    What does this desire and this inability of ours proclaim to us but that there was once in man a genuine happiness, of which nothing now survives but the mark and the empty outline; and this he vainly tries to fill from everything that lies around him, seeking from things that are not there the help that he does not get from those that are present? Yet they are quite incapable of filling the gap, because this infinite gulf can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object—that is, God, Himself. He alone is man’s veritable good, and since man has deserted Him it is a strange thing that there is nothing in nature that has not been capable of taking His place for man: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since he has lost the true good, everything can equally appear to him as such—even his own destruction, though that is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to nature.
    ... Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensées (Thoughts) [1660], P.F. Collier & Son, 1910, #425, p. 138-139 (see the book)
    See also Amos 8:11-12; Ps. 42; 86:10; John 4:13-14; 6:32-35
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, You desire to feed Your people. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
    search    script    mobile
sub    fb    twt    Jonah    Ruth