A God-shaped void

J. K. Rowling is, without a doubt, one of the women of our time. From her head emerged a saga that, whether she likes it or not, has the potential to be considered a classic and, in recent years, she has suffered, like few others, the harshness of a culture of cancellation. She had always presented herself as agnostic but, a few weeks ago, in a long tweet, which is worth reading and thinking about, she declared: "I have struggled with religious faith since my mid-teens. I seem to have a God-shaped void inside me, but I can never seem to decide what to do about it. I could probably list at least twenty more things I have changed my mind about. At present I have no belief that cannot be altered by clear and concrete evidence and, except in one case, I know what that evidence would have to be. The exception is the God conundrum, because I don't know what I would have to see to decide firmly on one side or the other. I guess that's the meaning of faith, to believe without seeing evidence, and so I will probably go to my grave without resolving that particular personal issue."

The author of Harry Potter put the spotlight on one of the keys to our current society: the immense emptiness, as immense as the only God capable of filling it, which has undermined the very foundations of coexistence, moving from the logic of encounter to the logic of confrontation. 

Faith is today the longed-for unknown, the unknown goal in a world that struggles to replace it while confirming, at every step, the ineffectiveness of the substitutes offered to us: glory, fame, economic power or the finite promises of Artificial Intelligence. In one of the catecheses that Pope Benedict XVI delivered, precisely in the Year of Faith, he seemed to respond to this question posed by the British author: It is not a question of accepting only "something" that cannot be seen, but "someone" whom we can love: "Faith gives us precisely this: it is a trusting surrender to a 'You' who is God, who gives me a certainty different from, but no less solid than, that which comes to me from exact calculation or science. Faith is not a simple intellectual assent of man to particular truths about God; it is an act by which I freely entrust myself to a God who is Father and loves me; it is adherence to a 'You' who gives me hope and trust. Of course, this adherence to God is not without content: through it we are aware that God himself has shown himself to us in Christ; he has given us a glimpse of his face and has made himself truly close to each one of us". 

Filling this void is the task of every Christian in this world. We have no other way of living our faith than "going out". The mission to unite a fragmented, polarized and divided world, but, above all, an empty one, is the translation of living by faith and thus being builders of peace.