A God-Shaped Hole?

Growing up, I was taught there was a “God-shaped hole” inside me, a specific emptiness designed to draw me toward the one thing that could actually fill it. I don’t remember questioning it much at the time. It was Sunday school shorthand and an Audio Adrenaline song title, and it did the job it was supposed to do. It made longing feel like evidence rather than a problem.

Surprisingly, locating lack at the center of a person, and desire as the engine that follows from it, is not far from how psychoanalysis thinks about human beings either. But sit with the phrase a little longer and I think it starts to expose something it was never meant to reveal.

Whatever Fills the Hole

It’s worth noticing what the metaphor assumes: an absence defined entirely by what completes it. That is not a neutral picture of a person. A God-shaped hole implies a particular solution. The hole matters only because of what fits it, which means the whole exercise becomes a search for the right object.

That is exactly the trap Peter Rollins identifies in The Idolatry of God. An idol is not simply the wrong object of devotion. It is anything that promises the fantasy of satisfaction.

The problem, then, is not that we sometimes choose the wrong thing to fill the hole. It is that we have already accepted the picture of ourselves as beings completed by finding the right thing. Once desire is imagined this way, every disappointment simply sends us searching for a better object. We trade one idol for another while leaving the structure untouched.

Which raises a more uncomfortable question. What happens when the object we place there is called “God”?

Freud’s The Future of an Illusion is often remembered as an attack on God. I’m not convinced that’s quite right. Freud is careful to distinguish an illusion from an error. An illusion is a belief driven by a wish, and he says plainly that this doesn’t make it false. It might even turn out to be true. Whether or not Freud believed in God isn’t the question that interests me here. His real concern is the psychological work our idea of God performs. Why this picture of God? Why this personification? Why this promise? Those questions don’t disappear if God exists. If anything, they become more important. The danger isn’t simply denying God. It’s confusing God with the picture that has quietly come to occupy God’s place.

Psychoanalysis reminds us that our conscious understanding is never unmediated. We make sense of the world through language, memory, imagination, and the stories we’ve inherited. Whatever else may be true about how God is revealed to us, we can only think about God through those same human capacities. We speak in words, imagine in images, and understand through concepts. Our conscious grasp of God is always mediated.

That is not a problem to be solved. It is simply part of being human. Forgetting it is one of the oldest temptations in the religious life.

god and God

I find it helpful to be deliberate in how I write the word two different ways. Lowercase god names the picture I carry around in my imagination, the one I know how to anticipate, explain, and defend. Capital-G God names the Divine who always exceeds that picture and resists symbolization. I’m not proposing a new theological distinction. I’m simply trying to preserve one that’s easy to lose. The moment my picture of God becomes identical with God, I’ve quietly traded the living God for something much easier to manage, something that’s soothing me instead of pointing beyond.

Psychoanalysis gives that picture a name. It belongs to what Lacan calls the Imaginary, the register where images, coherent wholes, and stable identities live. We cannot do without it.

Think about a crucifix for a moment. The object itself doesn’t tell you what it’s doing. Around one person’s neck it becomes a confession of faith. In another home it is a family heirloom. In a horror movie it becomes protection against vampires. Someone else treats it almost like a lucky charm. The crucifix hasn’t changed. What changed is the place it occupies in the imagination of the person holding it. The same object can become an opening toward God or a way of managing God.

A Prayer to Be Rid of God

Meister Eckhart’s prayer is a really helpful reminder here: “I pray God to rid me of God.”

For years I heard that line as a clever paradox. Now I hear it as one of the most faithful prayers a Christian could pray. Eckhart wasn’t asking to lose God. He was asking to lose the god he could finally comprehend. The god who fit comfortably inside his imagination. The god who had quietly become easier to trust than the living God who always exceeds every picture built of them. The god who keeps becoming an idol.

We cannot think, worship, or love without imagination. That was never the problem. The problem is forgetting that our pictures remain pictures, however beautiful or necessary they may be. Faith is not the absence of images. It is the refusal to confuse them with the One they are trying to reveal.

Growing up, I was told the goal was to fill the God-shaped hole. Maybe the hole was never supposed to be filled. Maybe faith is less about finding the one thing that finally satisfies us than learning to remain open to the God who continually exceeds every image we’ve ever built.

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Eckhart, Meister. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. Translated and edited by Maurice O’C. Walshe, Crossroad Publishing, 2009.

Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1995.

Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Translated by James Strachey, W. W. Norton, 1961.

Hoard, Paul. “Finding Christ in the Disturbing Real of the Other.” The Other Journal, Jan. 2025, theotherjournal.com/2025/01/finding-christ-in-the-disturbing-real-of-the-other/.

Marion, Jean-Luc. God Without Being: Hors-Texte. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson, University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Rollins, Peter. The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction. Howard Books, 2013.

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