An Empty Pit God Alone Fills

One of my favorite film series are the Indiana Jones movies.  I especially like “The Last Crusade,” filmed in the Petra National Archeological Park of Jordan.  Why?  Because our family got to visit that site.[1]

You buy your tickets at a kiosk which would entitle you to admission but also to a camel ride.

I remember trekking along that narrow pathway between towering basalt cliffs, a path not wider than four or five feet in some places.  Talk about camels and the eye of a needle.

Finally, one arrives upon an open scene of what looks like various buildings carved in to basalt cliffs about one or two thousand feet distant facing you.  Of course, there is the fabled Treasury Building, the site where the sought after Holy Grail, the Chalace of Christ, was to be found – at least in the film.

Indiana Jones has to solve a number of riddles to secure entrance to the room where this precious cup is located in order to bring back healing wine to his dying father.  If the cup is given to another, it grants healing, not immortality.

As he makes entrance a pushy woman who has been trailing him rushes in, holding Jones hostage with her pistol.  She seeks immortality. 

There on a stone platform is an assemblage of chalices guarded by a spectral knight who supposedly has been guarding the room for some two thousand years.

Whoever chooses the correct chalice among the several dozen cups will live forever. This specter urges a wise choice.  A wrong choice will lead to disaster.

This arrogant, self-absorbed woman, assuming that Christ’s standards for choosing such a cup would be hers, grabs the gaudy, ornate jewel-encrusted gold cup and swallows the liquid in one gulp.  Immediately she begins to dissolve in shrieks of horror as her face slowly slides off her skull.

The guardian knight drolly remarks, “She chose poorly.”

For the rest, rent the movie.  It’s a delight.

We walked around, looking at the many amazing edifices carved into the stone cliffs.  And we actually got to go into the one used in the film.  But the mystery of the place was ruined by the many stalls selling food and folks with carts selling souvenir trinkets.

We figured that there would be food when we got back to the entrance so we passed on the food stalls there in the middle of the park.  Wrong.  When we got to the entrance there was absolutely no food or water to be had.  We were famished.  My stomach was a deep rumbling pit.

Then came along a young fellow selling bags of cashews and bottles of water.  We bought a huge bag of those nuts and never had anything tasted so good. 

The empty, aching pit in my stomach, like the empty void in that woman’s soul who grabbed up the wrong chalice in the Indiana Jones film can be understood as that empty God-shaped hole St. Augustine talks about.  He says that all humans are born with a God-shaped hole that nothing will satisfactorily fill but God alone.  We try to fill it with many other things – things far less than God.

The Psalmist talks about this hunger.  And God’s hunger.

“If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the whole world is mine and all that is in it.  Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?  Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and make good your vows to the Most High.”[2]

God seeks in us Righteousness.  That is God’s hunger for humanity.  It is all about “An Attitude of Gratitude,” as the saying goes in the 12-step movements.

Back in the day when Jesus became a rock star with the musical, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” there appeared bumper stickers proclaiming, “Honk if you love Jesus.”  A group of progressives put out an alternative, “Tithe If you love Jesus.  Any fool can honk.”

Acts of Righteousness.  Now about that old fashioned word, righteousness.  My Old Testament professor Dr. Rolf Knierim, said the best modern equivalent would be Solidarity.

Solidarity with God, with one another and with all creation.  Exactly as the God force is in solidarity with us and the rest of creation.

And to make good our vows to the Most High, what is required is faithfulness on our part.  As God might say, “How about giving me a little help here.”

The Letter of James urges, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works?  Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?  So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”[3]

Right now, next to the White House there lies a huge, ugly gaping hole.  As empty as that pit was in my stomach.  The current occupant, seeking to satisfy an endless hunger in his soul has planned on building a gaudy, ornate monstrous ballroom.  An edifice to what he presumes to be the grandeur of his personality and importance.  Kitsch to the max.

That cavernous hole is a testament to the God-shaped hole in a soul that seeks to fill with adulation, gold trinkets and ersatz accomplishments – endless wars, cruelty to deportees and a grift beyond all imagining.  All artificial, desperate gestures.

My prayer for him.  That he might fill his soul with true deeds of Righteousness, deeds of Solidarity.  As might we all.  Yes, don’t just honk.

It begins with moments of prayer.  What I call Holy Daydreaming.  Allowing myself to be open through the Spirit to need.  Listening.  Listening to my true needs within, the needs of others.  Personally, I don’t need my name in big gold letters on any of my accomplishments.  And in reality, neither does Trump.

This spiritual awakening follows with choosing what nourishes the soul.  Read a good novel.  Moral fiction awakens the reader to what builds and binds us together in fellowship, in sisterhood.  Tony Morrison, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Colson Whitehead, Sandra Cisneros, Claude Brown, Ralph Ellison, Louise Erdrich.  Erdrich’s novel, The Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse,[4] is a heartwarming delight.  Wendel Berry’s Jayber Crow[5] is the one of the few post-apocalyptic novels with a most satisfying ending.  It reeks of humanity.

Dip into the Book of Common Prayer for one of the various daily prayers.  Try the poetry of Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, or Langston Hughes.

Read some good autobiographies or collections of writers:  Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln’s collection by the American Library.  The American Library has a great collection of several hundred titles of our most noted American authors, essayists, novelists, naturalists and historians

Read a science book to get the real low-down on what we’re doing to the planet.  Spiritual growth means STAYING AWAKE.  Read of the Thwaites Glacier disintegration, now threatening a sea-rise of some three meters.  That’s right, folks.  Nine feet.  Trump’s new anthem at Mar-a-Lago won’t be “America the Beautiful.”  No, it will be “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine.”  Yeah, we did this.  Spiritual growth is grounded in reality.

Spiritual growth can be measured by our willingness to confront the worst within us, the evil of which we are capable.  Would that that Orange Felon at 1600 Pennsylvania might dare to look at the devastation he and his buddy Netanyahu have wrought in Gaza and Lebanon – would that they might be willing to let that carnage of mangled bodies sear their hearts like hot coals – would that the pictures of this destruction force them to their knees, force us to our kneels – there might be a smidgen of hope for their souls, for our souls.  Perhaps then some of that the vacuity of this God-shaped hole might be filled with something truer than fluff and self-delusion.

Finally, get out in nature.  If it’s only sitting in a chair in one’s backyard and taking in the delight of a warm spring day.  Delight in the refreshment of a local city park or a hike in a nature preserve.

Oh, one more thing essential to fill any spiritual void – SHOW UP.  Show up with friends and neighbors.  Show up with folks in civic organizations.  And might I suggest, show up at your place of worship.  We all need the support, correction and infectious joy of a congregation.  We need others who will share our woes and disappointments, our struggles.  And we, through our support and empathy need to offer our true selves to the others.  A gift to others, a gift to ourselves.

Yes, don’t just honk.  Let your works of Solidarity refresh your soul and the souls of others.  This is the door to Paradise, that bountiful reality that would even now fill the hearts of all seekers.

One of my friends, after hearing me recite a maxim on follow-through, responded that I was just full of all sorts of sayings.  I replied that is because they have served me well.  I close with this, again from the Letter of James:

“But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deluding your own selves.”[6]  It will serve you well and just might pry open the door to Eternity.  Good in season and out of season.

Amen.

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[1] “The Last Crusade,” 1989.  Released by Paramount Pictures, directed by Steven Spielberg.

[2] Psalm 50:12-14, NRSV.

[3] James 2:14-17.  NRSV.

[4] Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse (New York: Harper Collins, 2001).

[5] Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (New York: Counterpoint Press, 2000).  Both these are available through Good Reads.

[6] James 1:22-25.  New King James Version.

June 7, 2026

“An Empty Pit God Alone Fills”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Hosea 5:15-6:6; Psalm 50:7-15
Romans’ 4:13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26