Native American Messiah

At the end of the 19th century, while white Americans were busy decimating the Buffalo population, some Native American shamans shared a vision of what is called the "Ghost Dance":

All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. Pretty soon in next spring the Big Man come. He bring back all game of every kind. The game be thick everywhere. All dead Indians come back and live again. They all be strong just like young man, be young again. Old blind Indian see again and get young and have fine time. When Big Man comes this way, then all Indians go to mountains, high up away from whites. Whites can't hurt Indians then. Then while Indians way high up, big flood comes like water and all white people die, get drowned. After that water go way and then nobody but Indians everywhere and game all kinds thick. [...] Indians who don't dance, who don't believe in this word, will grow little, just about a foot high, and stay that way. Some of them will be turned into wood and be burned in fire.

There are some obvious parallels to the Christian notion of the Second Coming, but what I find more interesting are the differences. Through various tensions and misunderstandings, the movement was dealt its strongest blow at Wounded Knee in 1890 where the US Calvary killed at lest 153 Sioux. The Ghost Dance movement quickly fade in response to this defeat. When prophecies aren't fulfilled, shouldn't they be ignored? In this respect, the faith of the Native American seem more reasonable than Christianity (excluding extremely liberal interpretations of "Christianity").

The Shadow of It

Timothy J. Keller once gave a lecture titled "The Significance of Tolkien". He discusses J.R.R. Tolkien's work and the origin of the various names and languages in the books. The following is somewhere between a quote and a paraphrase.

Everybody ... even his best friends (except Lewis) thought the Lord of the Rings was too bizarre. Many of you know, it flew completely against the canons of what you might call "modernist literature". When he wrote it, there was no category for it. Fantasy was essentially invented by Lord of the Rings. Here's my main thesis: he did not really write fantasy. Peter Jackson, the director of the films said, "You have to understand, Tolkien was not writing fantasy. He was writing mythology for the first time in centuries."

The basic inspiration for Tolkien's stuff was linguistic, which means he was not exactly making things up, but he was reconstructing a linguistic and imaginary past that could have existed. A person who is a pure fantasy writer just says "I'm thinking of a story and I'll make stuff up. There's a woman, what will I name her? I'll name her this, or that." That is not how Tolkien worked. He would get a name, and ask, "What does that mean? Where would that name have come from? What kind of person would have that name? What kind of story would that person have been in?" For example, he would be writing and up would come Faramir. He would not say "ok, what kind of character do I want Faramir to be?" he would say, "who is this guy? I need to find out."

He was rediscovering an imaginative world which is the root of all Northern European culture, thinking, and mind. There's reverberations of these words still in our heart. He was trying to ask... what was it that happened way way back, what experience, what being, what kingdom, so that even today we remember the shadow of it?

Tolkien said, there is a kind of very sad and yet very joyous story: you can call it a romance, you can call it an epic, a quest, you can call it even a fairy tale, that modern people said "we're past that now, we don't believe in hope we don't believe in good and evil." And Tolkien said, deep down inside we all need those stories. We need a story that tells us how bad things are, and we need a sudden turn in the story, that snatches victory from death and through suffering overcomes everything.

Reimagining the God-Shaped Hole

Pascal once wrote, "There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the Creator, made known by Jesus Christ." Augustine may have had something similar in mind in his confessions, "...You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in You." The idea shows up in popular Christian literature, and music from Audio Adrenaline to Plumb and U2. Sometimes you'll even hear Christians using this metaphor with nonbelievers.

I'm not in the business of hating on Pascal and Augustine, but the idea seems inconsistent with Christianity. From the Christian perspective, saying there is only a hole in us is a radical understatement — to the point of being false. It implies that we're fine, just incomplete — as though sin left a shrapnel wound, and we just need some extra flesh in a few spots. It makes God our doctor instead of our heartbeat. But this isn't the language Jesus uses to describe the Christian walk: unless you completely die to yourself, you're worthless (e.g.: Matthew 10:37-38).

There is a way to save the metaphor, however. If the "hole" is called "my purpose in life", then the emptiness should filter down to every part of our being — fulfilling Christs' description. This reveals the problem with our natural interpretation of the metaphor: we ignore the crucial connection between who we are and what our purpose is.

Paul presented this point more clearly while in Athens, accounting for the obviously unfulfilling worship, while still calling for a "radical life-change":

When I arrived here the other day, I was fascinated with all the shrines I came across. And then I found one inscribed, TO THE GOD NOBODY KNOWS. I'm here to introduce you to this God so you can worship intelligently, know who you're dealing with. The God who made the world and everything in it, this Master of sky and land, doesn't live in custom-made shrines or need the human race to run errands for him, as if he couldn't take care of himself. He makes the creatures; the creatures don't make him. Starting from scratch, he made the entire human race and made the earth hospitable, with plenty of time and space for living so we could seek after God, and not just grope around in the dark but actually find him. He doesn't play hide-and-seek with us. He's not remote; he's near. We live and move in him, can't get away from him! One of your poets said it well: "We're the God-created.' Well, if we are the God-created, it doesn't make a lot of sense to think we could hire a sculptor to chisel a god out of stone for us, does it? God overlooks it as long as you don't know any better--but that time is past. The unknown is now known, and he's calling for a radical life-change.

This turns Christianity into a memory we're trying to recall (vaguely reminiscent of Plato's form-based epistemology) rather than a hole to be filled. "The haunting awareness of something which is out of reach and may not even exist" as Fernando Pessoa put it; the feeling that "something in me was born before the stars, and saw the sun begin from far away". Pessoa writes:

There was a rhythm in my sleep.
When I awoke I lost it.
Why did I ever cease to live
That erstwhile self-surrender?

I know not what it was, that was not.
I know it lulled me softly,
As though the very lulling would
Make me once more the one I am.

There was a music that over
When I awoke from dreaming it.
It did not die: it still endures
In what inhibits thought in me.

While Pessoa was a borderline nihilist, the same idea appears in theistic authors and songwriters:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing... For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
(C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)

Like an ancient memory,
remember how it used to be...
one day we'll wake up from this dream
and we'll stop sleeping,
oh, yo, then we'll see clearly
(Matisyahu, "Warrior")

There's a place where I come from
It's the place where I belong
Where you will never die
Wipe the tears off from your eyes...
(Burlap to Cashmere, "Digee Dime")

It seems that Christianity is less like filling a hole, and more like remembering where we came from.