home | contact
Joe Cowley

That God-Shaped Hole

Lookin’ for to save my soul,

Lookin’ in the places where no flowers grow,

Lookin’ for to fill that God-shaped hole.

— Bono of U2 fame

Joe Cowley, first-grader, dangled his feet in a pew. Decades later, he keenly remembers the moment. Now and then, this middle-born child of eight siblings had suffered the discipline of the stern Dominican nuns in an Omaha parochial school. His knuckles bear the scars of raps delivered by Sister Mary Peter.

But there in the pew, young Joe didn’t cower at the nuns’ cautionary tales of hell. It didn’t make sense to him, this punishing God. “It was all very clear to me, that as long as I was true to God” — this God of unconditional love — “everything would be okay,” recalls Joe.

In his work as executive director of the Center for Alcohol and Drug Services in Davenport and Rock Island, Joe comes across people with “God-shaped holes” in their hearts. “If you don’t have a spiritual journey,” says Joe, “there is a void you’re trying to fill. Unless you build a spiritual journey, it will not work. I tell my clients that I’ve never found happiness in anything but my spiritual walk with my Higher Power. And I say that my Higher Power is God.”

Every day Joe meets people with gaping holes in their hearts. They’re professional women and men addicted to gambling or internet pornography. They’re the marginalized or the mentally ill. Most frequently, Joe connects with adults and adolescents addicted to alcohol or marijuana.

“The void for people is part of the human condition,” says Joe. “People are hurting or missing something, replacing it with a substance that changes their brain chemistry.”

In prayers during Advent worship, we call on God to “stir up our hearts.” We hear a voice of one crying out in the wilderness to make the rough places smooth. We wait and watch for God, the giver of every new beginning.

Joe Cowley knows about wildernesses, rough places, and new beginnings. He meets people with “God-shaped holes” in challenging terrain every day. “If God’s love is free and unconditional,” he says, “all you have to say is ‘come on in.’”

In Joe’s growing-up years, his father’s work as vice president of AT&T kept the family on the move through 28 states, from California to Texas. Young Joe adapted to constant change and rootlessness. “It was like living in a different country and culture every nine months or so.” he recalls.

He pushes up the sleeves of a loose-fitting sweatshirt, his typical daily attire. “So I don’t really mind or care what people think of me.” When he moved to Iowa in 1985, he “had to figure out how to have lasting relationships because I wasn’t moving away.”

Senators and CEOs dined in the home of Joe’s youth. Yet Joe rejects the trappings of wealth and the “elitist attitude.” He’s constantly giving his stuff away. “I don’t hoard. That’s when things become your God, rather than God being God.”

But Joe cherishes his mother’s St. Jude’s medal, which he wears daily in his work with addiction. This patron of lost causes reminds Joe that God can transform even the most desperate of situations.

Joe describes himself as “half gentle, and half ferocious when I see an injustice.” His mother left him with her “heart of social justice” — born out of deep devotion to her Roman Catholic faith — and commitment to “taking care of your neighbors.”

Lookin’ for to fill that God-shaped hole. Joe and Julie Cowley remind their daughters — Kelsey, 19, and Bridget, 14 — that “God is the only one who is going to fill what you need in that hole. All the rest is fluff.”

It is God who fills the valleys and makes the rough places smooth. In Advent, we watch and wait for God, our sure and certain hope, to fill the voids that only God can fill.

  ::  

"It is a blessed thing to know that no power on earth, no temptation, no human frailty can dissolve what God holds together." ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian