by AmericanBoy

Created on: April 18, 2010   Last Updated: April 23, 2010

The first time I heard the song Supermassive Black Hole by the English group Muse, I couldn’t help but think of the quote by the legendary philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal.   Referring to our spiritual condition, Pascal famously 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 through Jesus.”  As someone who wrote a groundbreaking treatise in 1647 on vacuums, Pascal knew what he was talking about.  He wasn’t simply referring to emptiness.  He was speaking about a drawing... an unavoidable pull.  Pascal was suggesting that there is an eternal restlessness woven into the fabric of the human heart that is only satisfied through relationship with God.  It is this supermassive black hole that pulls us forward in our unending quest for meaning.  

Many are in agreement with this concept of inherent restlessness and need.  In 1934, a Brooklyn-born Jewish-American psychologist named Abraham Maslow revolutionized the world of psychology with the release of his paper A Theory of Human Motivation. Considered the father of Humanistic Psychology, Maslow concluded that every human being is born with a drive to fulfill a heirarchy of inherent, universal needs. According to Psychology-The Search for Understanding by Simons, Irwin, and Drinnien, “Maslow has set up a hierarchic theory of needs. All of his basic needs are instinctoid, equivalent of instincts in animals.”  These needs fall into five categories: Physiological, Security, Social, Esteem, and Self-actualizing.  As Maslow saw it, life is an endless pursuit, the struggle to satisfy these universal needs. We develop our personhood through the process of meeting these needs and progressing into the next level with the ultimate goal being “self-actualization.”  His views have been widely embraced and they inform numerous disciplines, ranging from education to sociology.  While I disagree with the some of Maslow’s underlying philosophies, we find common ground in his primary conclusion.  All of us, whether we are cognitively aware of it or not, are driven by internal forces to strive for something more.

In the Washington Post article “Most Americans Believe in Higher Power, Poll Finds,” Jacqueline L. Salmon states,  “A belief in God or a higher spirit is pervasive. Even

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>